Ben Shahn: Untitled [exterior of home, probably Arkansas] (1935)

"It almost seems as if I disappoint myself on purpose."

I survive the final fortnight of Summer by focusing on what I clearly do not understand. Weather predictions indicated a possibility of rain early this week, but this promise was barely fulfilled with a brief gust and a few scattered drops around sunset the day before yesterday. Another possibility appeared in yesterday's report, but that one also failed to produce. A forty percent chance of rain rarely results in very many raindrops here. Another part of the region must attract the weather through this season, because we don't, or we haven't. This might have something to do with the very nature of Likelihoods, which by their name seem to suggest that a stated outcome will prove likely. We might as easily classify these as Unlikelihoods, connoting the production of an absence, since Likelihood doesn’t always promise the mentioned outcome. A 40% chance of rain means that there's a 60% chance of none.

Even labeling such a prediction a "probability" connotes that something will "probably" happen, and it reliably does. The probability suggests that what's predicted will happen, but the report isn't predicting rain. It's a prediction of both rain and no rain, depending upon what cannot be predicted. This back-handed precision seems self-fulfilling, similar to declaring that something will either happen or it won't. Assigning Likelihoods ensures the projection always sums to one hundred percent probability that it will happen, either/or-wise. Even if it should rain over 60% of the region, it still fulfills the predicted 40% threshold. If it rains nowhere near, it can declare that it got that 60% part of the prediction right.

It's said that random selection fuels evolution. Probabilities determine which organism succeeds or fails, and evangelicals have complained for nigh on to two hundred years about this characterization. They take offense at randomness, insisting that God, their designated creator, doesn't roll dice. Yet, his much-vaunted "mysterious ways" in which he purportedly works seem the very soul of such randomness. No other phenomena seem to more accurately model their God's apparent capriciousness. His actions seem similarly understandable, like even the more pedestrian weather prediction, which also appears to exclusively work in equally mysterious ways. One might even insist, without seeming altogether too obnoxious about this, that probability might even be that God we struggle to envision.

I learned when in my fifties that probabilities and, indeed, all of mathematics, had always served as a metaphorical language intended to describe physical phenomena. I had believed from my first brushes with numbers that they were somehow more immutable than that, that they contained truths rather than similes, facts rather than shadowy suggestions, but the mathematicians I'd known insisted that my notions seemed childish to them. They had mastered mathematical manipulations because they understood that their intuitions couldn't provide as helpful a portrait as their calculations could. They could consider phenomena that reliably baffled our five senses, even when they labored in concert. Nobody accurately intuits exponentiation, for instance, and those who try reliably appear to be fools. (Notice how I'm not mentioning members of our current administration here.)

I wait unrequited, still setting sprinklers after I'd expected to be retiring them for the season. No reason other than the misfortune of the draw determines where the rain falls here. No incantation reliably attracts cirrus clouds. Nothing but freak changes in wind direction ever result in Pacific storm systems funneling in. The predictions require considerable interpretation, and even then, I tend to get my expectations up over nothing. There seems to be a continuing high Likelihood that I will continue with my fruitless anticipations into the absolutely unforeseeable future. It almost seems as if I disappoint myself on purpose.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz