To Taxonomy

http://greensandjeans.com/2011/07/23/
batik-wedding-quilt/batik-quilt-2/

The problem with language--of course there are many problems, so let me say that ONE of the problems with language--is the paradox (I’ve been searching for the right word and only paradox comes closest) that when we name something, that is, we assign a word, however precise or imprecise, to a thing, an idea, a movement, a moment, a feeling, a sense, we cut it off from all the things surrounding it, cut it, shall we say, out of the fabric from which is it created, and give it a shape, and then we match it to the other things we have cut in a similar shape but from different fabric and we call them similar, which, in fact, is true only in so far as we have made it such.

Take Emotions. How is “anger” anything like “joy”? Think before you answer that.

The paradox is, clearly, that if we don’t do this, if we resist what some might call a natural instinct, but what, for obvious reasons, I am going to not name, though if I had to, I would call it a biological imperative much like a heartbeat or cellular division, if we don’t do this we die because we cannot survive in a world we do not name because the naming is the very way we respond and responding is the very way we live.

Responding is living, is it not? Think before you answer that.

I offer, or better, I proffer, that the paradox is that we only know what we have created, rightly or wrongly, what we have discovered and named and categorized and organized, and even though we think it’s a system out there in the world because we see it (birds, hungers, snows, holidays) (and by see I mean “identify” because it’s not always physically visual, though it is always psychically visual, or at least known) and we never know that from which we have created, the fabric from which we have cut, the fabric that has fallen away out of our consciousness and into whatever it falls for which we don’t have a name because if we did it would exist and therefore would be a fabric itself, falling away, and then another and another.

Remember fractals? Think before you answer that.

The paradox is that we only know what we can know (and by know I mean name) and even as the boundaries of our knowledge expand in the exact way and in the the exact proportions to the universe expanding, the edges of it always moving farther and further, we cannot know what the boundary is expanding into, that is, the space that is not actually space at all, but what I will call “the-about-to-be-space” because it is the realm we can never explore, fill or empty.

Do you believe in God? Think before you answer that.

We have, therefore, quite literally and metaphorically, created the world and the systems in and of the world, even though it seems as if we have discovered them--the mathematics, the biologics, the economics, the linguistics, the judicious and suspicious, the ceremonious and contemptuous, the anxious and the frivolous, the suspended and the fraught with danger--and in that formation we have created ourselves both as the collective and the individual and yet here we stand and sit and cry as if the world is out there, at the end of our fingertips, and we can only touch it, maybe hold it, sometimes shape it.

If you could give yourself a new name, what would it be? Think before you answer that.