Not to believe the chickadees wept

Currently at Toronto Pearson: 12. Turns out we didn't get through October without getting below freezing. Up until Monday morning I had been thinking I might stick it out at the cottage through this week, but then heard -11 in the forecast for that night, so I had to pack it up. It did in fact get down to -11 in Bancroft Tuesday morning, and -3 at Pearson. So, that's my nightshades and squashes done for the year. One day back in September I was thinking how my tomato crop had pretty much failed this year, and then later that day I read the StatsCan CPI report for the month, and saw that tomatoes had by far the biggest year-to-year price increase of any single thing they monitor. Same was true for October. So I guess it's been a bad year for tomatoes all around. (I noticed early on in the summer that apparently it was a bad year for impatiens, too--mine all died, and they all died in the flower beds at an apartment building a couple of blocks away.) Annoyingly enough, despite the continued absence of groundhogs, I got even fewer acorn squash this year than last year--some combination of powdery mildew and squash vine borers killed off all the plants (and also, by September, most of my zucchinis). Surprisingly, the most successful of my crops that are now done was the eggplants--surprisingly because they like sun, and we got less of that this year than usual. Just like last year, my little yellow banana peppers kept me steadily supplied, but the red peppers (this year I tried shepherds) were a bust--if a pepper actually got to be red, most likely something had been eating it already. Still on the go: turnips, parsnips, beets, chard, and a few carrots. I'd have to say that, so far, chard has provided the best return on investment of anything I've grown. It grows easily, nothing except groundhogs eats it in any serious way, it regenerates when you harvest it, it keeps growing until the ground freezes, and you eat the entire plant so nothing is wasted (although with other things, if you return what's "wasted" to the ground, nothing is wasted either).

Another bit from a month ago (!) at the cottage:

Here's why I would be a terrible parent: yesterday I decided that when the chickadees had emptied the feeder of safflower seeds I would leave it empty for a day at least, so that they wouldn't be too dependent on the feeder. (I don't think they actually are all that dependent on it--it's a small feeder and it takes them close to a week to go through it. They don't just sit there and gobble the seeds up until they're gone, like house sparrows would. (As with the hummingbirds, only one of them is permitted at the feeder at once.





(I guess this may have something to do with why they seem smarter to me than the house sparrows do. The house sparrows will all sit there together and dumbly ignore each other. The chickadees are very interested in each other, though not in a friendly way (though also not in an overtly hostile way like the hummingbirds (who will sit near the feeder and try to guard it from other hummingbirds. E.'s father used to find this hilarious at their cottage: "Look at them, they're trying to kill each other!"))) They do evidently learn from each other. Early this year, they were throwing the safflower seeds on the ground trying to get at the food they remembered being in there last year, or at least that they know is supposed to be in a thing that looks like this thing. (I'd brought up the safflower seeds so as not to be creating colonies of black squirrels or house sparrows. I am no doubt contributing to a chickadee boom, but at least they've always been here. My grandfather used to call them "Ruthie birds", because of the little whistle that you often hear from them, a descending minor third, like you'd use to taunt "Dar-ryl" or call Ruthie in for dinner.) Eventually, apparently, it dawned on one of them that actually these things are the food, and what you need to do with them is take them to a tree branch and put them between your toes and hammer at them with your beak, like you do with sunflower seeds.



Pretty quickly that's what they were all doing.) Sometimes they're gone for hours; sometimes it seems like I hardly see them all day. Still, I worry about it.) Today, they emptied the feeder, and I watched them keep coming, and tilting their heads and reaching in and pulling out nothing, and pecking at the clear plastic--and I felt like they were sad, and I was sad, so I filled the feeder up again. (For I am a sensitive man, and would you believe I write poems?) This, I suppose, is how you end up living with a hundred cats.

Who then can be saved?

Currently at Toronto Pearson: 14. High today: 18.

Leafs' overall record this season: 10-4. Leafs' record in games I have listened to on the radio or seen on television: 3-4. But they're turning it around. They started out 0-3 in games I listened to on the radio. Thankfully they have finally figured out how to win games I listen to on the radio; they've now won two of those in a row. (Hopefully they will not also figure out how to lose games I don't see or hear.) There is probably a pretty good lesson about statistics and small sample sizes here. Come to think of it, this reminds me of how my father used to say that every time he watches the Jays, they lose. (This was back in the day when they were winning around 60% of their games.) Coincidentally, I had been meaning to mention something about my father watching Jays games--I had been meaning to mention how, if the game was going to the 9th with the Jays down by more than a run, he would say, "Well, they've lost this one," and quit watching. That drove me up the wall. There's nothing like the annoyance of having chips down on an unlikely outcome and someone "predicting" that you'll lose. (I feel for Cardinals fans, real baseball fans who are also Cardinals fans, going to the 9th down by five last night, steeling themselves against hopelessness.) Since the outcome is unlikely, of course they'll probably turn out to be right--and if they turn out to be right, you can't prove to them that they weren't necessarily right. Beyond the annoyance of it, I always think how if you turn off every game where your team goes to the 9th down by two or more, you'll miss out on every single one of their great ninth-inning comebacks. Why would you willingly deprive yourself of that, just for the sake of missing the unremarkable last innings of some lost games? The biggest ninth-inning deficit that any team has ever made up is nine runs. In the fullness of time, some team will break that record ... probably.

There's a passage of The Sickness Unto Death that I think about a lot. The Sickness Unto Death is a book about despair. It takes its title from Jesus's comment on the condition of Lazarus: "This sickness is not unto death." It is, on its face, an odd comment, because Lazarus is, in fact, dead, as Jesus says. But Jesus goes on to say to Martha, who is Lazarus's sister and has reproached him for not coming earlier and saving Lazarus: whoever believes in me will never die. Even those who are dead, if they believe in me, will never die.

It is in the Lazarus story that the verse "Jesus wept" occurs. Jesus weeps because Mary and Martha believe that Lazarus, who is dead, is dead. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead because no one, not even Mary or Martha, really believes that it doesn't make any difference whether he raises Lazarus from the dead or not. (Well, on re-reading, that's probably not exactly fair to Martha. Martha reproaches Jesus first, or at least appears to reproach him, in the same words that Mary will use: "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died." But Martha adds: "But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee." Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again, and she says: "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." It is to this that Jesus replies, "I am the resurrection and the life." He asks Martha whether she believes that "whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," and she says that she does, and she goes to fetch Mary. Mary, unlike Martha, is weeping; "When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled." (It is Mary--the prodigal daughter--who later anoints Jesus while Martha serves. In Luke it is Mary who listens to Jesus while Martha works, and Martha complains.) Anyway, the point is that everyone is not equally faithless--but at the same time, no one is perfectly faithful.) The only way to make people believe that it doesn't make any difference whether he raises Lazarus from the dead or not is to raise Lazarus from the dead. ("For this cause the people also met him, for that they heard that he had done this miracle"--and so the chief priests decide that Lazarus must be put to death.) O ye of little faith, take heart: even the faith of Mary and Martha is insufficient; Jesus must perform the ultimate miracle even for them, that they might be saved. (The Lazarus story only occurs in John; in John it is Jesus's only resurrection miracle, and in John it's the grand finale miracle--after that, Mary anoints Jesus (only in John is Mary specified as the anointer of Jesus), Judas complains (only in John is Judas specified as the complainant, and John notes that Judas complains because he is a thief and wants the money for himself--John's Judas (much unlike the Judas of Jesus Christ Superstar!) is a villain through and through), and the rest is history.) Surely you, then, can be forgiven your faithlessness, but the point, for Kierkegaard (as for Jesus) is not to be forgiven for your wrong-doing; the point is to be saved from your faithlessness, from your hopelessness, from despair. If you know French, the point is obvious: espere means to hope. "To despair" means to be hopeless.

Poor doubting Thomas: Jesus singles him out--"Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed"--but, since his resurrection, no one has believed without his proving himself: Mary Magdalene took him for a gardener until he spoke to her; he showed his wounds to the other disciples (whom he found in hiding) without their asking. After the Thomas story, John says that Jesus performed many other miracles besides the ones he has told you about, but he has told you about the ones he has so that you may believe and be saved. Thomas doesn't even believe in the accounts of his brethren who have seen with their own eyes. Why would you? It almost seems that the very point of the gospels is that no one is perfectly faithful, that faithfulness is in fact next to impossible, and there is nothing to be done about it. (Yesterday I was reminded by a post on Reg Hartt's blog that "Israel" means "he who wrestles with God". You might say it almost seems that the very point of the Hebrew bible is that God must be wrestled with--which is something like what Howard Adelman is saying here, in a post speculating on why so many Nobel prize winners are Jewish. Using the word "faithfulness" in a way I haven't been using it (i.e., to mean something more like "loyalty"--semper fidelis), Howard says: "Faith and trust in others is not a lesson of Judaism, even faith in God. In fact, as the arguments with God over the ages attest, one perhaps has to be most wary of God. Judaism does not teach faith or love – agape – but hesed, faithfulness. You must be faithful to your father and to God, but you do not have to have faith in either one. They may or may not deliver on their promises.") Luke, remarkably, preempts the grand finale miracle of John with "the parable of the rich man and Lazarus": Lazarus is a leper who lies at the gate of the rich man; Lazarus dies and is "carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom", and the rich man dies and goes to hell. The rich man pleads with Abraham first to let Lazarus soothe his torment, and then to at least send Lazarus back to warn his family: "if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent." Abraham refuses: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead." Of course (!) one might not take that last bit to refer only to the resurrection of Lazarus.

When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? But shall he find it even in himself? Not even in himself does he find perfect faithfulness: Why hast thou forsaken me? Jesus himself goes into hiding when the priests decide to kill him. No one is perfectly faithful.

So, here's that passage from The Sickness Unto Death I think about a lot:

Salvation, then, is humanly speaking the most impossible thing of all; but for God everything is possible! This is the struggle of faith, which struggles insanely, if you will, for possibility. For only possibility saves. When someone faints, people shout for water, Eau-de-Cologne, Hoffman's drops. But for someone who is on the point of despair it is: get me possibility, get me possibility, the only thing that can save me is possibility! A possibility and the despairer breathes again, he revives; for without possibility it is as though a person cannot draw breath. Sometimes the inventiveness of human imagination is all one needs to come by possibility, but in the end, that is, when the question is one of having faith, the only thing that helps is that for God everything is possible.

So goes the struggle. Whether the person who thus contends goes under depends entirely on whether he gets hold of a possibility, that is to say, whether he will have faith. And yet, he understands that humanly speaking nothing could be more certain than his undoing. This is what is dialectical in having faith. In general all a person knows is that this and that, as he hopes and expects, etc., is not going to happen to him. If it does, he goes under. The foolhardy person throws himself deliberately into danger, where the possibility may also be this and that; and if it happens, he despairs and goes under. The believer sees and understands his undoing (in what has befallen him or what he risks) in human terms, but he has faith. Therefore he does not go under. The manner in which he is to be helped he leaves wholly to God, but he believes that for God everything is possible. To believe in his own undoing is impossible. To grasp that humanly it is his undoing and yet believe in possibility is to have faith. Then, too, God helps him, perhaps by letting him avoid the horror, perhaps through the horror itself; that help unexpectedly, miraculously, divinely turns up. Miraculously, for it is a remarkable piece of pedantry to suppose that a person's being miraculously helped could only have happened eighteen hundred years ago. Whether a person has been miraculously helped essentially depends on with what passion of mind he has grasped that help was impossible, and in the next instance on how honest he is towards the power which nevertheless helped him. But people as a rule do neither the one nor the other; they shriek that help is impossible without ever taxing their minds on how to find help, and afterwards they ungratefully lie.

Perhaps this might not resonate with you, perhaps you might resist it, because you don't believe in a "personal God" who might take an interest in providing you with a saving possibility. I myself don't believe in such a personal God. But I'm not sure Kierkegaard does, either. A couple of paragraphs later he says: "Since for God everything is possible, then God is that everything is possible," and then: "God is the fact that everything is possible, or that everything is possible is God." He is of course thinking of Jesus's answer to the disciples when they ask him who can be saved if it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. I think as well of what God tells Moses when Moses asks for his name, which I first heard from Howard Adelman (but now I suppose this is well known) was better translated "I will be what I will be" or "I am becoming what I become" than "I am that (or what, or who) I am". Who am I? Let's wait and see. All I am is yet to be. Sartre says that to be a united in-itself-for-itself, actuality coinciding with possibility, is to be God, but God himself may beg to differ. God, maybe, also is not what God is and is what God is not--Kierkegaard's God, I suspect, is not what God is and is what God is not even more than Sartre's human; such is the case for God perfectly as it can't be for us; we may be radically free to choose among our possibilities, but our possibilities are nonetheless, as Heidegger says, "thrown-projections" of past actualities--choice may be free, but what choices there are is determined. Such is the case for us--as Kierkegaard would say, "humanly speaking". God is the fact that what choices there are is not so determined. My history has conspired to place me in a present where I must choose between a future of x and a future of y. Choosing either x or y, I will "go under", but these are the only possibilities available to me. Nothing else is possible, but with God all things are possible. (Jesus himself cries out for possibility: "And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.")

Well, all right, at this point, at the risk of deflating it, I want to "de-mystify" it. The point that I take from all this, come to think of it, is related to the point I took from Sartre on bad faith in thinking about moral luck: as much as you think you have a handle on the situation, as much as you think you've got all the angles covered and see all the possibilities, you never really do. (You are always, as Sartre says, "persuaded by non-persuasive evidence".) Often you haven't even got the half of it; often you're missing the one essential thing about the situation and so, however much detail you've comprehended, you haven't really got any of it at all. To give the situation up to God is to give it up to the unknown possibility that always exists.

Is this deflating? Does it make Kierkegaard less grand? Does it reduce Kierkegaard to self-help cliche? I dunno. It may be cliche, but damned if it isn't hard to believe--and yet you must believe it. So often you feel that you have no other choice--and, feeling that you have no other choice, you go under--and it is always false. (This is not to say that there is always a better choice.)

Postscript: the saying "where there's life, there's hope" seems to have its roots in Ecclesiastes 9:4: "For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion." For Ecclesiastes, the hope of the living is false hope; all is vanity under the sun.