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But he turned first
Aug. 12th, 2010 04:53 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 27. Currently in bloom: purple loosestrife and rabbits.
I was just about coming out the bottom of the ravine the other day, when the footsteps that had been following at a distance for a while said, "Hey, bro! Amigo!" I turned around expecting not much good, and a guy is pointing at the edge of the grass where it goes down to where the brook should be, and he says, "Look, a rabbit!" And there is. Surprising that I hadn't picked it out myself, but some tree had caught my attention (a tree of heaven, probably--one of my minor obsessions these days is trying to distinguish trees of heaven from staghorn sumacs). It's one of those things that would make me wonder how much wildlife I've just missed in the ravine--this rabbit was actually the first wild mammal other than squirrels that I'd ever seen there--but then I saw another one, by the Spadina bridge, on my way back. After standing there watching it for a bit ("are there rabbits here?" he asked, puzzlingly; he had seen a fox and a coyote (it had red eyes and he thought it might be the devil) and a deer (but north somewhere), but never a rabbit; he works in renovation but there was no work today so he was out walking; he has a diploma in travel and tourism but there is no work in that so he might go home to Cancun; I had wondered if my supposing he was Mexican was just my northern ignorance (in last week's Now, someone from Argentina or somewhere is said to have a "Spanish accent")). As we were going our separate ways, I thanked the guy for pointing out the rabbit, and he asked me if I knew about the rabbit in the moon. It's an Aztec and ... Greek? story, he told me--"look it up!"
Having seen a few butterflies on my way through the ravine, I had been trying to think of some more of "The Tuft of Flowers"--I don't remember what couplet it was I was stuck on when some tree caught my attention out of the footsteps that had been following at a distance for a while and dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech with one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. Walking down the curving street from the ravine to Davenport, I passed a lawn that had been mowed around a flowering wild chicory plant.
Things go faster when you know what's going to happen. The second time you see something on the television, it seems shorter than it did the first time. The seasons and years go by faster as you get older. For human beings, this can only be extended so far: there's only so much you can know about what's going to happen, and of what you can know, there's only so much you can remember. We might infer that for an omniscient being, everything necessarily would happen at once. (This would test the definition of "omniscience" (and the concept of knowledge). For everything to happen at once, one would have to not only know everything that's going to happen, but be conscious of everything that's going to happen, simultaneously. The slightest lapse of attention would keep everything from happening at once--and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.)
I learned about Christian fundamentalist vegetarians a number of years ago when L.'s sister tried vegetarianism for a while. (She's not a Christian fundamentalist; she just happened to get some vegetarian cookbooks by Christian fundamentalist vegetarians.) Seeing as God says in Genesis 1 that all the plants are given to the humans for food, but says nothing about them being allowed to eat animals (but only that the humans will have dominion over them), the Christian fundamentalist vegetarians suppose that we are only allowed to eat plants. I had never put this together with Cain and Abel until a few weeks ago when I was looking it over for my lecture on the Genealogy of Morals (which--the "First Essay", at least--I like to call a sermon on Genesis 4). Of course God turns up his nose at Cain's offering; Cain is trying to give God people food! (Then again, turn that around, and Cain is giving God food out of his own mouth. Abel, we might suppose, is giving God the future shirt off his back. We feel like Abel's offering is better because we think meat is better than vegetables--but a sheep alive is more valuable than a sheep dead and to be eaten. Vegetables can be used only once.)
By the way, ever since I first read the Genealogy seriously, it bugged me that the Genealogy does not seem to be a real genealogy. Near the beginning, Nietzsche derides his buddy Paul Rée for speculating about the origin of morality by projecting his English utilitarian prejudices onto the past. He says that as opposed to Rée's blue-sky speculation, genealogy is "grey", getting into the dull historical facts of the matter. (Foucault plays this up a bit in his "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History".) But Nietzsche's "history" in the Genealogy is, at best, greyish blue--it is entirely undocumented, clearly produced more or less off the top of his (albeit well educated) head. The thing is, I realized as I was going to teach the Genealogy, it is called Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift. The "Zur" came to be translated as "On the" and forgotten about, assumed to be the kind of meaningless particle we no longer bother putting at the beginning of titles, so that we now simply refer to "Nietzsche's Genealogy", supposing that it is Nietzsche's genealogy. But the title says it is Eine Streitschrift--a polemic. A polemic is not a genealogy--a polemic is red, not grey. "Zur" can also be translated as "toward the" or "toward a". The Genealogy is not a genealogy; it is a polemic, toward a genealogy, in which Nietzsche projects his own divided moral psychology (we intellectuals today are battlegrounds, he says) onto the past. So you can take Rée's blue-sky speculation, or Nietzsche's fire-red polemic, or you can do dull grey genealogy and find out the real origins of morality.
Four in the 9th to walk off against Papelbon. According to the stat-heads, four of the five best teams in baseball are in the AL East. And the Orioles are 8-1 under Buck Showalter. This Jays team, over the next few years, might be the best one ever, and might still not make the playoffs. Even this year they're easily better than the team that made the playoffs in '89, probably on par with the team that made the playoffs in '91.
I was just about coming out the bottom of the ravine the other day, when the footsteps that had been following at a distance for a while said, "Hey, bro! Amigo!" I turned around expecting not much good, and a guy is pointing at the edge of the grass where it goes down to where the brook should be, and he says, "Look, a rabbit!" And there is. Surprising that I hadn't picked it out myself, but some tree had caught my attention (a tree of heaven, probably--one of my minor obsessions these days is trying to distinguish trees of heaven from staghorn sumacs). It's one of those things that would make me wonder how much wildlife I've just missed in the ravine--this rabbit was actually the first wild mammal other than squirrels that I'd ever seen there--but then I saw another one, by the Spadina bridge, on my way back. After standing there watching it for a bit ("are there rabbits here?" he asked, puzzlingly; he had seen a fox and a coyote (it had red eyes and he thought it might be the devil) and a deer (but north somewhere), but never a rabbit; he works in renovation but there was no work today so he was out walking; he has a diploma in travel and tourism but there is no work in that so he might go home to Cancun; I had wondered if my supposing he was Mexican was just my northern ignorance (in last week's Now, someone from Argentina or somewhere is said to have a "Spanish accent")). As we were going our separate ways, I thanked the guy for pointing out the rabbit, and he asked me if I knew about the rabbit in the moon. It's an Aztec and ... Greek? story, he told me--"look it up!"
Having seen a few butterflies on my way through the ravine, I had been trying to think of some more of "The Tuft of Flowers"--I don't remember what couplet it was I was stuck on when some tree caught my attention out of the footsteps that had been following at a distance for a while and dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech with one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. Walking down the curving street from the ravine to Davenport, I passed a lawn that had been mowed around a flowering wild chicory plant.
Things go faster when you know what's going to happen. The second time you see something on the television, it seems shorter than it did the first time. The seasons and years go by faster as you get older. For human beings, this can only be extended so far: there's only so much you can know about what's going to happen, and of what you can know, there's only so much you can remember. We might infer that for an omniscient being, everything necessarily would happen at once. (This would test the definition of "omniscience" (and the concept of knowledge). For everything to happen at once, one would have to not only know everything that's going to happen, but be conscious of everything that's going to happen, simultaneously. The slightest lapse of attention would keep everything from happening at once--and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.)
I learned about Christian fundamentalist vegetarians a number of years ago when L.'s sister tried vegetarianism for a while. (She's not a Christian fundamentalist; she just happened to get some vegetarian cookbooks by Christian fundamentalist vegetarians.) Seeing as God says in Genesis 1 that all the plants are given to the humans for food, but says nothing about them being allowed to eat animals (but only that the humans will have dominion over them), the Christian fundamentalist vegetarians suppose that we are only allowed to eat plants. I had never put this together with Cain and Abel until a few weeks ago when I was looking it over for my lecture on the Genealogy of Morals (which--the "First Essay", at least--I like to call a sermon on Genesis 4). Of course God turns up his nose at Cain's offering; Cain is trying to give God people food! (Then again, turn that around, and Cain is giving God food out of his own mouth. Abel, we might suppose, is giving God the future shirt off his back. We feel like Abel's offering is better because we think meat is better than vegetables--but a sheep alive is more valuable than a sheep dead and to be eaten. Vegetables can be used only once.)
By the way, ever since I first read the Genealogy seriously, it bugged me that the Genealogy does not seem to be a real genealogy. Near the beginning, Nietzsche derides his buddy Paul Rée for speculating about the origin of morality by projecting his English utilitarian prejudices onto the past. He says that as opposed to Rée's blue-sky speculation, genealogy is "grey", getting into the dull historical facts of the matter. (Foucault plays this up a bit in his "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History".) But Nietzsche's "history" in the Genealogy is, at best, greyish blue--it is entirely undocumented, clearly produced more or less off the top of his (albeit well educated) head. The thing is, I realized as I was going to teach the Genealogy, it is called Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift. The "Zur" came to be translated as "On the" and forgotten about, assumed to be the kind of meaningless particle we no longer bother putting at the beginning of titles, so that we now simply refer to "Nietzsche's Genealogy", supposing that it is Nietzsche's genealogy. But the title says it is Eine Streitschrift--a polemic. A polemic is not a genealogy--a polemic is red, not grey. "Zur" can also be translated as "toward the" or "toward a". The Genealogy is not a genealogy; it is a polemic, toward a genealogy, in which Nietzsche projects his own divided moral psychology (we intellectuals today are battlegrounds, he says) onto the past. So you can take Rée's blue-sky speculation, or Nietzsche's fire-red polemic, or you can do dull grey genealogy and find out the real origins of morality.
Four in the 9th to walk off against Papelbon. According to the stat-heads, four of the five best teams in baseball are in the AL East. And the Orioles are 8-1 under Buck Showalter. This Jays team, over the next few years, might be the best one ever, and might still not make the playoffs. Even this year they're easily better than the team that made the playoffs in '89, probably on par with the team that made the playoffs in '91.
