Can't say much has happened since

This time of year I'm reminded of that quote from Rogers Hornsby: "People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring." Yesterday after I took the water apart at the cottage I set down in my settin' chair and stared out the window over the lake and thought maybe I'd just set there until I died. Wasn't a single night this mid-fall before this first bout of real cold that I'm sure the pump would've frozen if I hadn't been getting up to run the water ... which means there were no clear nights and early mornings, which means I never had any real good night skies to look at while I was running the water through the night, never spotted Jupiter coming up in the morning sky into its conjunction with Venus next Monday morning that I won't be up there to look for (but may be too far down in the sun glare to see anyway, I'm not sure). No going-away presents this year, either--no northern lights, no flying squirrels, no flocks of turkeys flying across the bay, although on the other hand no Duck Man coming into the bay to paddle up to the summer-tamed mallards and blow them away point blank. (Which, yep, is undoubtedly more humane than trying to shoot them on the wing and so possibly in the wing, but ... well, I was going to say, if you could do that, I mean look something in the eye and blow it away, but of course I (and you too) could do that, for the plainest sense of "could", though maybe not for some other interesting sense of "could", which would bring me back around to Shame and Necessity, and shame, and necessity, and all that, which, Lent will be here again before you know it, wibbly wobbly. (Well, you know, I have in fact killed fish in my life, with a hammer, which reminds me of something I was thinking when the gunshots started up around here last month: when I was a kid, you kept a fish and ate it because it was a keeper, and you knew it was a keeper because you kept it and ate it. It's not like you--it's not like I--really wanted to eat a largemouth bass because you found them so delicious. (Funny thing being, as an adult, I do find fish delicious and would gladly cook up a largemouth bass that came out of the lake, but I can (for some sense of "can"!) no longer look one in the eye and beat it to death. So I eat frozen fish, which is, in most ways, ethically worse, from a non-character-based point of view. (Maybe you have to say from a non-first-person-character-based point of view, because after all a whole lot of other characters are involved in catching or raising and killing my frozen fish.) You killed and ate it as a trophy of your victory. (Of course what you really wanted was a mounter, but our lake didn't have any mounters in it, or so our experience led us (probably wrongly) to believe. (Once two other kids and I hauled a canoe over to a more remote little lake, and I came back with the big fish of the day, the biggest fish I'd ever caught up there. [ETA, come to think of it, it was three other kids and I--I was thinking that we alternated two of us in the canoe and one waiting on shore, but it was actually three in the canoe.] When the father of one of the other kids saw it he said "that's almost a goddamn mounter!"--which, I had been sure it was. But it wasn't.))) There were, finally, the first of the flocks of goldeneyes and mergansers and buffleheads, and I'm pretty sure I heard and then saw a trumpeter swan beating its way into the air almost clear across the lake. In the last week or so the last adult loon seems to have finally fled from the last young loon.

For years I've been saying that Roy Halladay was the one individual player I ever got a ticket to go see--for his last start before the trade deadline in 2009 [1], when the fans chanted "Trade J.P.!" (J.P. didn't manage to trade him that season, and so trading Roy Halladay was Alex Anthopoulos's first big job after J.P. Ricciardi was fired. (Kyle Drabek was the showpiece they got back, and that worked out badly. But Michael Taylor turned into Brett Wallace turned into Anthony Gose turned into Devon Travis, which ... we're still holding our breath on that one.)) I was reminded the other day that there was another game I went to, I don't remember whether it was by myself or not, to see Roy Halladay--his first start back in Toronto in 2011. Jose Bautista (who inherited Roy Halladay's mantle as the Jays' best player by WAR) homered off the windows in centre field but Roy Halladay threw a complete game--after he became a full-time major league starter in 2002, he led his league in complete games seven out of twelve seasons, including an injury-shortened 2005 when he completed five out of 19 starts) and won. I feel like the Jays and Phillies fans chanted "Yankees suck" together, which maybe really happened, but maybe it was just so beautiful that that must've happened.

Currently at Havelock: -4.6. High today: -3.1, at midnight. Got down to -10.1 this morning. Toronto Pearson got below freezing for the first time on Nov. 8, which ties with 2004 as the latest on record there.

[1] I mistakenly had this as 2010, in part because I'd forgotten that his first start back in Toronto was two years later rather than the next year as originally scheduled, because the G20 protests and cop meltdown in Toronto caused a Jays-Phillies series that was supposed to be in Toronto to be moved to Philadelphia.

I wish there was a treaty

It struck me yesterday while I was washing the dishes--I do some of my best thinking and have some of my worst crushing while I'm washing the dishes--that the two basic ways of thinking about God's act of creation--i.e., (1) God creates absolutely ex nihilo, such that all that is comes solely out of and is nothing but an expression of God's own being, and (2) God takes formless stuff, chaos, and orders it--correspond to the two basic ways of interpreting Hegel's Phenomenology: if the self-alienation of Spirit begins out of an absolute unity then there can be an absolute reconciliation (and the self-alienation of Spirit is, in a way, illusory and narcissistic), but if it begins with Spirit alienating itself into something that is really other to itself then the dialectic of its working out its relation to itself through the other may never be complete. I don't know whether one version of creation is more Christian and the other more Jewish.

Try to say the grace

It must also be said, as I get into it more, that there is some very striking Christian content on You Want it Darker--at least, some overt references, water into wine, a cup of blood. Which reminds me of something I was thinking about Howard Adelman's latest series of blog posts, on Abraham and Isaac--Howard, as I've known since one of the classes I took with him nearly twenty years ago now, and as he has been on again about a bit this week, does not like Kierkegaard's take on the Abraham and Isaac story. (I've taught Fear and Trembling a couple of times, which naturally involves getting into the story and what it's all about and how to interpret it, which naturally runs the risk of losing sight of what Kierkegaard wants to do with the story, which after all is the point. The idea of the teleological suspension of the ethical by virtue of a relationship with the divine absolute is an extremely important idea--which I want to get into sometime this cold season (actually, Either/Or keeps bobbing up near the top of my cold season reading list, though it's so bloody long that trying to read that probably won't leave time for reading much else), with reference to a paper I heard a guy give at EPTC this year about becoming yourself with a little help from your friends--apart from whether it's appropriate to interpret the Abraham and Isaac story along those lines. Although if the Abraham and Isaac story isn't about that, if you wanted to tell a story to illustrate it, you might as well tell one just like that. (Which raises the question, on what grounds might you say that it is not about that. Obviously one ground would be that that is not what its author, i.e. God, means to show by it. (Which reminds me, I recently learned that there is one use of the Greek word for "allegory" (which is basically the same word in Greek as in English, and is composed of al-, other, + agoreuein, to speak in the agora, i.e., to speak publicly or openly: i.e., to allegorize is to speak publicly but otherwise, i.e., otherwise than the public meaning of what one says) in the New Testament; it's used by Paul in reference to the Abraham and Isaac story.) Another set of grounds would have to do with the Kierkegaardian interpretation not being as good as some other interpretation in terms of the value of the story for our edification.)) New to me in what he's saying this week is that there are elements of anti-Semitism in Kierkegaard ... which got me thinking (and this is one of those things that once you realize it's a thing, you realize that this is obviously a well-known thing) that it must be maddening for Jews to have their holy scriptures read, and reinterpreted, by another religion that regards them as something like overtures to the main performance. But then listening to Leonard Cohen appropriate elements of Christianity I think, well, you can do this in the other direction, too. Come to think of it, I have been hazily aware of Christian readings of holy texts outside the Judaic line (not to mention, of course, ancient Greek philosophy) as confused graspings at Christian revelation. This, you'd suppose, has understandably gone out of style. But anyway, as I always want to say about all the manifold ways of thinking in philosophy, it is incumbent on everyone to appropriate in their own way all good-faith descriptions of revelation.

Currently at Havelock: -5.3.