classification and slipdisk delight

{image: book page depicting viscera from 13th century. Found in this fascinating article}

Within what ends up being an inter-textual set of nesting Russian dolls, author Mary Anne Staniszewski presents a list that has stuck with me for years. In her book "Seeing is Believing," which is itself a reaction to the famous text "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger, she makes reference to a portion of Michel Foucault's "The Order of Things." Foucault quotes from (yet another text) a Jorge Luis Borges novel (uncited in Stanislewski's book) in which is described the contents of "a certain Chinese encyclopedia." Are you with me? Even through the thickets of parentheses? Here it is:

...animals are divided into:
a) belonging to the emperor
b) embalmed
c) tame
d) sucking pigs
e) sirens
f) fabulous
g) stray dogs
h) included in the present classification
i) frenzied
j) innumerable
k) drawn with a fine camelhair brush
l) et cetera
m) having just broken the water pitcher
n) that from a long way off look like flies...

Foucault attributes our wonderment at a fabled list like this to our attraction to "the exotic charm of another system of thought," and also to "the limitation of our own [system], the stark impossibility of thinking that." What I've been thinking about lately is the way that real systems of thought over the centuries and across the globe provide us with as much wonderment as this fictional one. I love the history of the body humors, for instance, in which, with all earnestness and scientific inquiry appropriate to the time, body fluids like bile and phlegm were connected with specific seasons, the elements of earth, air, fire and water, and particular human personalities (see the link for specifics). This is only one of countless examples from every area of human study.



The inevitable conclusion I have to face when I look at this is that someday, our systems of thought will seem quaint as well. This is both disconcerting and liberating, and many of the drawings I'm doing lately are a product of this tension. Pictured above is just one of several types of hybrid creatures that have been populating my world-- a world that is also, notably, run amok by vivid burgeoning children's imaginations. My kids have looser boundaries between categories that we take for granted. Last night, the boys were both Jesus, raising people from the dead and bringing them to sit by a fire (a Memory box) and warm their hands. Today, they are Spiderman and Buzz Lightyear, and have requested that I "be Rita," who is a mouse with a British accent from the animated film "Flushed Away." Their ideas about the way the world is constructed and their imaginations are always in concert with one another, and I surmise that we adults have our own versions of this.

Our beliefs about reality get an awful lot of help from our synthetic imaginations. Categories shift and meld according to new input. Anyone who's tried to organize a garage or studio or office or home knows the difficulty of finding the right place for everything, and I feel like I'm very often rearranging my mental furniture in much the same way.