If You’re Gonna Smudge the Borders, Consider Smudging Hard

[Image: “Category Mistake: Cell Towers à la Palm Trees, Las Vegas, Nevada” by John E. Simpson.]

Probably a chaotic few days ahead, as The Missus and I transition from our extended state of “staying someplace” to one of “living someplace.” The distinction of staying vs. living somewhere, like a lot of distinctions, requires the drawing of rather arbitrary lines; in fact, we’ll probably be spending any given moment, post-move, more or less as we’ve been spending them for months now… with one difference. To wit: our minds will not be whirring like tops with all the things we must address to get through the next week or month. We’ll finally banish to the recycling bin all the stacks of used Post-It notes, all the scraps of notepaper covered with frantically brainstormed lists and reminders to ourselves. Gods willing, we’ll feel retired, finally — not feel that we’ve simply moved from one workplace to another (however mobile the latter may have been).

The awkward blurring of lines between one thing and another has cropped up a few times since last week. First, from whiskey river:

The world, every day, is New. Only for those born in, say, 1870 or so, can there be a meaningful use of the term postmodernism, because for the rest of us we are born and we see and from what we see and digest we remake our world. And to understand it we do not need to label it, categorize it. These labels are slothful and dismissive, and so contradict what we already know about the world, and our daily lives. We know that in each day, we laugh, and we are serious. We do both, in the same day, every day. But in our art we expect clear distinction between the two. We expect a movie to be a comedy or a drama. We expect writing to be serious writing or humorous writing. But imagine if the same thing were done to describe one’s hours or one’s days: Every day, when we buy a lollipop at the corner store, we hear a joke; someone banters with us; at we see something ha-ha in the newspaper; we watch something funny on TV; a friend tells a good story that makes us laugh. And all these thing happen even on the days when other, horrible things happen. But we don’t label our days Serious Days or Humorous Days. We know that each day contains endless nuances—if written would contain dozens of disparate passages, funny ones, sad ones, poignant ones, brutal ones, the terrifying and the cuddly. But we are often loathe to allow this in our art. And that is too bad.

(Dave Eggers [source])

And then, not from whiskey river:

What, it seems worth asking, is a wolf? The Oglala believe all animals are members of their own nations, with wolves thus deserving of “recognition as nations with full rights to live and move,” beings who are “relatives” and “equals” to humans. To the Cherokee, a wolf is a watchdog and hunter for Kana’ti, the power spirit of game animals and insects. To the Pueblo, a wolf is a gift sent by their creator, a magical spirit often represented as female with an ability to heal and instill courage, to know the night around her as easily as she knows her own bones. “In our astronomy / the Great Wolf / lived in sky, / It was… the mother of all women, / and howled her daughters’ names / into the winds of night,” writes Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan in her poem “The Fallen.”

To Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus, in 1758, the wolf was a creature to classify beside coyotes and jackals under the Latin genus Canis, for “dog.” While Canis lupus were wolves, Canis familiaris were our pets. Linnaeus’s main distinction was that the wolf was the one with the tail turned up at its end, like a comma flipped on its back. In recent years, after finding genetic differences between dogs and wolves to be negligible, scientists renamed dogs Canis lupus familiaris. The wolf in our family.

(Erica Berry [source])

All of which, maybe inevitably, led me to the ur-source:

The phrase [“category-mistake”] is introduced in the first chapter [of Gilbert Ryle’s 1946 book, The Concept of Mind]. The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired “But where is the University?” The visitor’s mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category “units of physical infrastructure” rather than that of an “institution”. Ryle’s second example is of a child witnessing the march-past of a division of soldiers. After having had battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc. pointed out, the child asks when is the division going to appear. “The march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division.” (Ryle’s italics) His third example is of a foreigner being shown a cricket match. After being pointed out batsmen, bowlers and fielders, the foreigner asks: “who is left to contribute the famous element of team-spirit?”

(Wikipedia [source])

One more Friday RAMH post from the road, then!