Quae hic disponis omnia

Sometimes I worry slightly that someday I will for some reason regret having written so much here in such a way as to be so unreadable to other people. But it hasn't really come up yet (although it does not escape my notice that precisely no one I've ever told about this thing (as opposed to the slightly more than zero people who have, or would have, ended up here anyway) has acquired the habit of reading it), and the future seems to generally resemble the past in this part of the universe, so, as we were.

I was looking at the Wikipedia article for Jack Frost, to see if the plot summary says anything about what the widow thinks about her dead husband's being a snowman, and saw that Henry Rollins and Frank Zappa's kid Ahmet, who was born two days after me, are both in it. Turns out Uncle Wikipedia doesn't have much to say about the widow, which I was interested in because it occurred to me that there's typically a third category, which the snowman's widow would typically belong to, of people in the my-father-is-a-snowman story, in addition to the good and wise believers and the bad and stupid scoffers, namely, the defeated and resigned who wish they could believe but can't. It occurs to me now, though, that there's a continuum between the two categories of unbelievers, because the mother in Miracle on 34th Street I guess (I don't know that I've ever seen the original all the way through or even that I've seen most of it, and I haven't seen the remake at all) is somewhere in between them. (Come to think of it, Miracle on 34th Street is a remarkable case in that, if my vague impression of it is correct, it pretty much takes the "Yes, Virginia" line on the existence of Santa and at least doesn't definitively stipulate that the guy who thinks he's Santa really is Santa; if I'm not mistaken, what you get from the movie is that the guy probably really is just insane but hurray for lovely insanity ... as opposed to It's a Wonderful Life, which doesn't confuse myth-making with essay-writing. And then, come to think of that, It's a Wonderful Life is a remarkable case in that it isn't really held against anyone, except maybe alternate-universe-Nick-the-bartender (who is the most interesting case in the alternate universe, in that, in a George-Bailey-less world, Nick's material condition and social status are better--he owns the bar instead of just being the bartender--but he is a worse person), that they don't believe Clarence is an angel; in the story, only George is really called on to believe that Clarence is an angel. Of course the audience is called on to believe it too, but the thing that annoys me about my-father-is-a-snowman movies is not their calling on you to believe the literally incredible thing, but their calling on you to condemn--I want to say "identify against", which from a web search doesn't seem that popular a phrase for what I want to use it for; social scientists must have some term for it--the people in the story who don't believe the literally incredible thing. It's fine for the movie to call on the audience to believe, because the movie stipulates that the literally incredible thing is true, so the audience has all the justification it needs to believe the literally incredible thing. (I keep wondering, to what extent if any is the fact--if it is a fact--that my-father-is-a-snowman stories so rarely if ever invite you to sympathize and identify with the unbelievers a cultural legacy of garden-variety Christianity with its assumption that unbelievers in its my-father-is-snowman story are rightfully condemned to hell?) It's not fine for the movie to call on the audience to identify against unbelievers in the story, because unbelievers in the story could only believe in defiance of evidence and reason--which means that the movie is calling on you as an audience member to identify as someone who would believe in defiance of evidence and reason if you were in their place. And that, of course, is what makes the New Testament so disturbing as a my-father-is-a-snowman story ... and doubly disturbing that it is taken by so many as a story that we are in and not just an audience to. (It's fine for the story to stipulate that God will burn you in a fire for not believing in Jesus if it is not taken to be the case that we are in the story and that the story therefore stipulates that we will be burned in a fire for not believing in Jesus.) The bottom-line question is, if you were God, why would you create reasoning creatures and then damn them for operating according to reason? (This is one of the main kinds of questions my reading the bible has prompted: how can it be that God's creation so often and so largely goes so poorly, to such anger and disappointment on God's part? Or, more to the point: how can it be, given what the bible has to say about that, that so many people seem to have believed what they have believed about God and the bible--namely that the bible is the God's-honest truth about a perfect God?) Which is of course just the sort of question a damned reasoning creature would ask.) I guess it goes something like this: there are the resigned who wish they weren't so resigned and admire innocent faithfulness, and then there are the resigned who regard their resignation as progress and are inclined to become impatient with the faithful's lack of it, and probably most of the resigned are not fully one or the other. (The faithfulness of the innocent is, in fact, grounded in their failing to have figured out, yet, that reality reliably makes sense, at least in the sense that if there is no sensible reason to think something is so, then it is very reliably not so (although the converse doesn't work nearly as well, at least for a relatively weak sense of "sensible reason" where to be a sensible reason is to seem to us, for some value of "us", like a sensible reason: lots of things that we think are so for what we take to be sensible reasons are not in fact so (he explained, as a demonstration that he is not completely unwilling to make himself clear)). This is actually a marvelous thing about reality, which among Christians is appreciated at least by Thomists (and I have been starting to fear that I'm running sharply counter-Kierkegaard here, except that the faith of the knight of faith is only heroic against a background confidence that the world reliably makes sense. It would be absurd to call a child, who doesn't expect the world to make sense generally, a knight of faith. The God who is that all things are possible is redundant if all things are possible anyway.) People who are resigned because they've learned that the world makes sense and so is not "magical"--or, more to the point, people who think people must be resigned if they've learned the world makes sense and so is not "magical"--are like people who are so insensitive that they find the world boring unless they're on drugs.) I suppose there's also an analogy to be made there to atheists who simply don't believe and atheists who hate (what they take to be) the very idea of God and so despise believers.

Today I learned what "adventitious" means, and I may even remember what it means because it turns out that the roots that grow from nodes in the stems of vining plants like ivy and squash are called adventitious roots. The trouble with that, though, is that "adventitious roots" might lead me to believe that adventitious things are things that take you on an adventure, away from where you started. Actually adventitious things are things that come to places the essences of which don't include their being there--they come "from without"--like roots in the middle of a stem rather than at its base.

Currently at the back of my shed: -3.8. High today at Peterborough: 7.1, at 2 a.m. Still a bit of snow on the ground after two days of rain.