Mum was having a fight with her lounge-side cross stitch lamp the other day. The cord kept getting snagged and the lamp repeatedly tumbled over. She became exasperated and eventually admonished the lamp for failing to stay upright like it was my father.
Glancing over, I said nothing and just watched. Sensing my silent intervention, Mum collected herself and declared by way of defeat: “I know, it’s an inanimate object.”
And I said: “Fucking congratulations Aristotle.”
The Greek philosopher was so taken with the idea of categorising things he came up with two semi-complementary and, frankly, unwieldy schemes for sorting all things into matter and form. Plants were green and did not move. Animals moved, he clarified, and one wonders whether this needed to be said even in 330BC. But then I remember a long-running feud I have with Mum every time she does an evening frog census in the yard and comes in to complain that a green tree frog she saw the night before is not on the exact same rock 24-hours later and therefore could be in grave danger; swallowed even. And every time she does this I remind her that frogs, alongside at least a dozen other animals, have evolved the novel power of locomotion.
She’s started doing the same thing with a pair of cute little bearded dragons who have taken to sunning themselves in the herb garden. If they’re not on their log, Mum will come to update me. “They’re not on their log,” she’ll say. And I’ll ask whether that is because they have feet. Don’t get me wrong, I love her childlike wonder at the natural world. It’s a real tonic. But it does make me think Mum would have been very quick to burn some poor innocent in the 1600s as a witch if she was at all sceptical about how they managed to leave a room.
Anyway, back to the ancient Greek peripatetic polymath. He further cuts the animal groups into those with blood and without blood — I mean, I guess? — and groups them into combinations of hot, wet, cold and dry which I think is just taking the piss. In Aristotle’s scale of perfection, minerals were at the bottom — being neither plants nor animals and having notably little to say about it — and then things ascend through plants and sponges, various larva-bearing insects and all the things cold and wet. By the time we get to the top four candidate categories, in order of perfection, we’re firmly in hot and wet territory.
One wonders whether he’d have been confused by a crab with a bunsen burner.
Man, of course, is at the top of the list. In his estimation, the only rational creature is Adam. Some animals do have souls, Aristotle contends, and can be blamed for their conduct but not in any particularly moral sense. Only man is rational, he says, and therefore only man is moral. (It’s never women with this lot is it, even in famously democratic Athens, citizens were defined as free men only and everyone else could just go get bent).
So, in among all things there are rational creatures, us, and all others are irrational.
I beg to differ.
Anyone who has spent time in our house this week will back me up.
Mum has decided it is time to have music on her phone so that she can play it when she drives her car two minutes into town and two minutes back from town. This was our JFK moment when he asked the nation in 1961 to commit itself to putting a man on the moon before the decade was out.
We might have given the same speech, he and I:
I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.
The only difference between the President and me is that the Apollo 11 lunar command module had some 500 different buttons, switches and dials on it and Mum couldn’t remember what the play button on a tape deck looked like and therefore couldn’t figure out how to press play on the music app.
You know how they do those experiments where the rats get a little hit of sugar if they work out that pulling a certain lever will give it to them? This was like that except the reward was The Beach Boys and Mum couldn’t find the lever. Rational indeed. To be fair to her, which she will tell you I am not being, she did eventually figure it out after a prolonged stand-off where I tried to help and then had to remove myself before I passed out in frustration.
It’s the distinction between artist and song that really threw her, as it has always done me. Neither of us are musically gifted and on the occasion she attempts a karaoke line or two at home the sound is so unnerving crows take flight. Also, she is pathologically incapable of getting the lyrics right. The result is like running Uptown Girl through an Enigma machine in the 1940s and then giving Alan Turing acid.
“You’re on the artist page,” I tell Mum, “but you need to add individual songs to your playlist.”
“But I don’t know what songs I like, I don’t know what they’re called,” she protests. I recognise this problem because I had, and have, the same one. The Shazam app, which records snippets of songs playing in the real world and tells you what they are, is one of my closest and oldest friends. Tell me what this is, I hiss at it when I’m in public and like the tune that I can hear. Mum doesn’t have this app so she faces a mountain of learning before she can even build the playlist she really wants. Sad!
We are all so insignificant before the unknown.
That’s why Aristotle got so hot for classification. One can apportion knowledge discretely and it feels conquerable in that way, though of course it never is. And while she might not be so flash with music, Mum can name just about every animal and plant in southeast Queensland and quite a few more beyond. I’m like music here, too. The banksia genus, with all its 170-odd species of flowing plants, is John Denver to me. I couldn’t tell you any of his songs.
Categories are, by their nature, inoperable at the border. They also require us to come up with things to say about the object of categorisation.
Take the white crowned snake Mum found in the garden last night during her — you guessed it — frog census. What a little cutie!
I’d never heard of this little fella before so I looked him up and discovered he is universally described as “secretive and nocturnal”. First of all, incredible. Secondly, the quality of being secretive implies this species of snake has secrets and acts to keep them hidden. That requires intention, a rational quality which forms part of the moral calculus of thinking beings.
Suck on that, Aristotle.
Obviously there are no secret-keeping snakes. This is an error of classification, and we are great at making them as a species. Aristotle made them. He thought all octopuses were stupid creatures and was rather voluminously mean about them to the point where, reading his 10-volume History of Animals while researching my own book My Year of Living Vulnerably, I formed the view that he had been personally offended by one.
I got a call this week from a real estate agent asking me if I’d like to discuss my “commercial property needs” for the next financial year and I said: “Now Alex why would I want to do that, I am but one man!” Then I explained that although the address he had for me from 12 years ago was correct I was not then nor have I ever been a commercial tenant unless you count my entire rental history as a cottage industry for the wealth generation of landlords.
Matters of public policy, animal species and music playlists aside, the zest for category is, ironically, a terrible kind of jeopardy. I’ve appended myself to personal categories so rigid I lost the version of me that actually exists. I’ve seen other people do it, too. I don’t wanna be all mawkish and what have you, but these often aren’t rational decisions. We just inherit markers of the group and give up a piece of ourselves, even our humanity, to adopt them.
In light of this understanding, I don’t feel so bad about my taste in music when people ask me what genre I tend to listen to.
Who knows? Whatever feels right in the moment.
Observations
Earlier this week, I went to help Mum pick up a 20kg bag of chicken feed from a new supplier who delivers to town once a week from a farm some 25 minutes away. It felt like a drug deal, taking place in the car park of local state school after hours. When we got there, however, I found myself in the middle of a chicken buy-swap-sell. A man wearing a hat larger than a Suzuki Swift kept barking at one of the people from the farm “how much are the hens” while some poor girl who looked to be all of eight had the job of transferring them between travelling cages for the various parties. There’s no coming back from this, I thought as I glanced around furtively. I’m a chicken guy in the sense that I am pro-chicken but I’m not a chicken guy. Not for me the Star Wars cantina of parking lot chicken barter. If I wanted to haggle over a chicken I’d ask a five-year-old to share a nugget.
One of my favourite little tweets recently is from a guy caled Thomas who posted: “have you ever noticed how in every movie that has apes in it, the orangutans are always the shaman class and the gorillas are the tanks. i’m glad we can all agree on that.” He added later that chimps are the “hidden berserker subclass” which is funnier still if you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons which I’m only just coming to understand some three decades after I should have been introduced to it by dent of my personality. Anyway, I shared this a few weeks ago with my actual friend Tom (I really need to get out more) and this week he sent me a link to a news article with the excited comment: “Shaman class!” The headline: “Orangutan seen treating wound with medicinal herb in first for wild animals.” If you ask me, it kinds of undersells the achievement because the primate was actually making a paste out of sap and the leaves of a plant with known anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects. I have nothing funny to say about this really except, as much as I love him, suck on that Aristotle.
Nephew update! I just can’t with his face. It’s the most serenely beautiful thing I’ve ever seen (probably because I don’t have to do night time feeds) and he just gets more expressive and god damned adorable everyday. My sister sent this to me because he is wearing my fox jumpsuit I bought for him (have loved foxes ever since I read The Little Prince when I turned 20) and he looks so bloody content and satisfied with himself.
For possibly the third time, Mum has been watching the Aussie show Upper Middle Bogan (it’s a pure delight, I can attest, and criminally under-rated) and I was passing through the living room during a Xmas episode when one of the, ahem, outer suburban characters unwrapped a present to reveal a quaint but fairly uncouth reindeer ornament. Mum yelled out: “Oh my God Rick, I have that exact reindeer! I bought it when I went to visit you in Melbourne!” I reminded her that the show was called Upper Middle Bogan and this was the aforementioned bogan mother and she shot back: “I love my reindeer.” She does. She really does.
God bless your mum’s eyesight as she’s still doing cross stitch. I had to give it up years ago! I’m back to knitting now. if you’re looking for a mother’s day present buy her a contraption that goes around her neck with two little lights on the end that you tap on and off- it’s been a godsend. I got mine on Amazon and there’s also one called Lumos. That will certainly see you crowned as the favourite child if you’re not already. Your nephew is adorable 😍
I was devastated when I learned that Descartes considered that animals felt no pain, and therefore experienced no feelings. (Excellent article in the SA, by the way; especially considering the week you described.)