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ultimately-useless mathematics
Tuesday, April 10 2012
Gretchen had a case of the full-on common cold today to the point where I had to take over the job of dog walking. I took Eleanor and Ramona down the Farm Road and over to the abandoned go cart tracks, passing a mystery sedan along the way (it was a Saturn parked adjacent to the bayou along the Farm Road in a place where none of the owners of the properties back there ever park). It left me wondering if perhaps, who knows, someone had driven there to commit suicide, but eventually the car left on its own. While within range of my local FM station, I listened to the recent Terry Gross interview of Paul McCartney, but when the signal broke up, I found myself listening yet again to one of the lose low-on-the-dial Christian stations. An evangelical speaker was telling us that Christians "bear fruit" while non-Christians are "barren" and must be pruned and will ultimately be cast by our loving God into a fire, just as grove-tenders have traditionally done with unproductive branches on olive trees in the Middle East. (Every Christian idea must harken back to the Middle East of two thousand years ago, the highly-parochial paradigm of its holy books.) Just because there are so many of them and they have so much power, I would love to understand the language of evangelicals, so found myself straining to understand what was being said. But never once did the speaker give an example of a "fruit" that a Christian might bear, so for me the entire lecture was ungrounded and unconnected to anything I understand (and, mind you, I feel like I understand a lot; I can even tell you how a Xerox machine works). Could it be that theology itself is completely unmoored from tangible reality, floating above it as a self-referential but ultimately-useless mathematics?
Back home and at the greenhouse (which is finally getting real use for the first time since I began building it nearly four years ago), I continued repotting plants. All the bigger ones that had never been repotted have already been repotted, so I was left with runt broccolis and tomatoes. Lacking enough small pots for all of them, I used larger ones (the disposable kind that come with small trees) divided in half with sheets of plastic.
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