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Currently at Bancroft: 12. High today: 14.
B. and I were headed to the Jays game last Sunday, trying to get there before the free Josh Donaldson shirts ran out, when traffic slowed on the DVP and emergency vehicles of all sorts started making their way past us. Before I could see where any of them had stopped, I saw a fire truck high above the road, on the Leaside Bridge. As we were coming up to the bridge, the rest of the flashing lights came into view ahead of us--but no wreckage. "It's a jumper," I suddenly realized. As all of us came to a stop, B. pointed out some colourful birds in a tree off to the side of the road. I rolled down the window and took some pictures. I thought they looked like orioles. I'd never seen an oriole before. Back in highschool I made fun of E. for thinking he'd seen an oriole in the park near his house, but I was wrong: orioles do come as far north as Toronto. (You can easily mistake a redstart for an oriole, so he may have been wrong, too--but he may well have been right, and I had and have no good reason to doubt him.) The funny thing is, I wasn't sure they were orioles until I looked at the frozen image of one of the pictures on my camera--as Nietzsche says, art first created the forms of things with which philosophers could think about what things are by freezing the flow of reality into still images--and recognized the bird that used to be on the Orioles' hats. And then we slowly moved along, and we saw the orange blanket on the pavement.
A while back, I suppose before the winter ended, B. and I watched the Trois Couleurs trilogy. I used to say, after I first saw those films in the '90s, that Red was one of my three favourite films, along with Eyes Wide Shut and Babette's Feast. But since then it's those other two that I've watched again and again and know line for line (as much as I can know anything line for line) and think about in relation to all kinds of things. Watching Red again now I was surprised at how much of it was unfamiliar. White used to be the one of the three that I cared least for, but this time it was my favourite. The thing that stands out in my mind about it is not the relationship between Karol and Dominique (who is rarely on the screen, despite Julie Delpy being featured on the DVD case), but that between Karol and Mikolaj. Mikolaj hires Karol to kill a man who wants to die but can't bring himself to kill himself. When Karol goes to do it, he finds (inevitably?) that the man is Mikolaj himself. Karol fires the gun into Mikolaj's chest; Mikolaj staggers but is unharmed. Karol tells him, with desperate urgency, that that round was blank, but the next one is real. He asks Mikolaj, do you really want to die? Mikolaj says he does not. And they go out and play.
I read something recently about a guy who interviewed a bunch of people who survived suicide attempts by bridge-jumping. This guy says that almost all of them are glad they lived, and that they typically say that on the way down they realized that everything in their lives was fixable except for the fact that they just jumped off a bridge.
There are lives that can't be made tolerable, and no one should be begrudged for ending such a life (though it is presumably often the case that one does not know whether one's life can be made tolerable or not. That passage I love from Kierkegaard is relevant here, about how, when the worst thing imaginable happens, the faithless person succumbs, but the person of faith in the God who is that all things are possible does not succumb.) But I realized long, long ago that the motivation to end one's life is not necessarily, and probably is usually not, and anyway for me was not, the same thing as the motivation to no longer be alive. The Greeks helpfully have two words with which the life one lives can be distinguished from one's being alive: bios and zoe. (Funnily enough, zoe is the word for being "biologically alive".) Being alive as a human being is a great thing, I realized, and this most basic fact can be occluded by the misery of the particular life you happen to be living as the particular person you happen to be. Realizing that does not make it easy, by any means, to see past the occlusion. But it is a faith you can hang on to even when you can't quite see it.
You can kill yourself and die, or you can kill yourself and go on living.
B. and I were headed to the Jays game last Sunday, trying to get there before the free Josh Donaldson shirts ran out, when traffic slowed on the DVP and emergency vehicles of all sorts started making their way past us. Before I could see where any of them had stopped, I saw a fire truck high above the road, on the Leaside Bridge. As we were coming up to the bridge, the rest of the flashing lights came into view ahead of us--but no wreckage. "It's a jumper," I suddenly realized. As all of us came to a stop, B. pointed out some colourful birds in a tree off to the side of the road. I rolled down the window and took some pictures. I thought they looked like orioles. I'd never seen an oriole before. Back in highschool I made fun of E. for thinking he'd seen an oriole in the park near his house, but I was wrong: orioles do come as far north as Toronto. (You can easily mistake a redstart for an oriole, so he may have been wrong, too--but he may well have been right, and I had and have no good reason to doubt him.) The funny thing is, I wasn't sure they were orioles until I looked at the frozen image of one of the pictures on my camera--as Nietzsche says, art first created the forms of things with which philosophers could think about what things are by freezing the flow of reality into still images--and recognized the bird that used to be on the Orioles' hats. And then we slowly moved along, and we saw the orange blanket on the pavement.
A while back, I suppose before the winter ended, B. and I watched the Trois Couleurs trilogy. I used to say, after I first saw those films in the '90s, that Red was one of my three favourite films, along with Eyes Wide Shut and Babette's Feast. But since then it's those other two that I've watched again and again and know line for line (as much as I can know anything line for line) and think about in relation to all kinds of things. Watching Red again now I was surprised at how much of it was unfamiliar. White used to be the one of the three that I cared least for, but this time it was my favourite. The thing that stands out in my mind about it is not the relationship between Karol and Dominique (who is rarely on the screen, despite Julie Delpy being featured on the DVD case), but that between Karol and Mikolaj. Mikolaj hires Karol to kill a man who wants to die but can't bring himself to kill himself. When Karol goes to do it, he finds (inevitably?) that the man is Mikolaj himself. Karol fires the gun into Mikolaj's chest; Mikolaj staggers but is unharmed. Karol tells him, with desperate urgency, that that round was blank, but the next one is real. He asks Mikolaj, do you really want to die? Mikolaj says he does not. And they go out and play.
I read something recently about a guy who interviewed a bunch of people who survived suicide attempts by bridge-jumping. This guy says that almost all of them are glad they lived, and that they typically say that on the way down they realized that everything in their lives was fixable except for the fact that they just jumped off a bridge.
There are lives that can't be made tolerable, and no one should be begrudged for ending such a life (though it is presumably often the case that one does not know whether one's life can be made tolerable or not. That passage I love from Kierkegaard is relevant here, about how, when the worst thing imaginable happens, the faithless person succumbs, but the person of faith in the God who is that all things are possible does not succumb.) But I realized long, long ago that the motivation to end one's life is not necessarily, and probably is usually not, and anyway for me was not, the same thing as the motivation to no longer be alive. The Greeks helpfully have two words with which the life one lives can be distinguished from one's being alive: bios and zoe. (Funnily enough, zoe is the word for being "biologically alive".) Being alive as a human being is a great thing, I realized, and this most basic fact can be occluded by the misery of the particular life you happen to be living as the particular person you happen to be. Realizing that does not make it easy, by any means, to see past the occlusion. But it is a faith you can hang on to even when you can't quite see it.
You can kill yourself and die, or you can kill yourself and go on living.
