An excerpt from his story "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" is justifiably one of the most celebrated things Jorge Luis Borges ever wrote. It's a classification scheme from a fictitious Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, and it must be seen in full.
In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into:
- those that belong to the Emperor,
- embalmed ones,
- those that are trained,
- suckling pigs,
- mermaids,
- fabulous ones,
- stray dogs,
- those included in the present classification,
- those that tremble as if they were mad,
- innumerable ones,
- those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
- others,
- those that have just broken a flower vase,
- those that from a long way off look like flies.
At the risk of explaining the joke, this is not how classification systems usually work. When scientists divide animals into categories, it's by things like vertebrate/invertebrate, coldblooded/warm blooded, etc. Laypeople might divide by domesticated or not, or by color.
The thing about Borges's system is that if you're going to follow it, it forces you to switch into a different mode of thinking for every succeeding item on the list. Which is where the fun lies.
1 comment:
I read that list a couple of times before seeing the relationships between the terms weren't actually straightforward. That's most definitely where the fun lies.
An art exhibit by David Byrne is another example. It's pretty cool.
Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing by David Byrne
In the Borges story “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” he describes a Chinese system of categorization that breaks down the world into Things The Emperor Owns and Everything Else. Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed that one of the most basic categories we humans have is “Can I eat it?” and then, “Do I like to eat it?” The way we categorize and perceive the world is sometimes based on what seem like arbitrary criteria.
For example, there could be intersecting layers of categories: brown things, brown things that are alive, brown things that will hurt me, brown things that make nice pants material. One imagines a kind of plaid semi-translucent three-dimensional Venn diagram representing these categories and their intersections. The number of categories in the world is, therefore, larger than the number of things in the world.
"Things that are good, beautiful, or both: I want to take time to honor them."
That's a most excellent way of seeing things.
Nice one.
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