Introduction to the 2019 edition
One of the biggest thrills I’ve experienced was when I spotted this book in the philosophy section of Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle. “They get it!” I thought to myself. Or someone has a sense of humor. It makes me happy that this book is being reissued; this tells me some folks find it useful as well as sometimes being funny.
We know that correlation is not causation, but it’s also true that there are times when unexpected similarities of patterns and initially dubious connections, often across disciplines, can enable us to think and imagine outside the typologies and categories that have developed over time. Although many of these cladograms might seem a bit far-fetched, they are often no less surprising than some of the discoveries and conjectures I have read about since this book first came out in 2006.
That time is a construct and it flows both backwards and forwards. That trees talk to one another through an underground network and that they protect one another. That religious children tend to be less kind and meaner to strangers. That music often does mirror cosmic relationships – or could it be the other way around?
These drawings came in a burst, a flood, and I can only think that something in my life, some context at that particular time, inspired me to think and explore by drawing at that moment. I have no idea what I might have been going through that drove my hand to move, but I seem to have intuited that drawing was the tool best suited for the job.
These are a kind of visual glossolalia, an attempt to explore the world beyond logic. I see them as, paradoxically, a non-verbal language that uses words to break their own stranglehold on us.
We have a built-in urge to make sense of the world, to presume cause and effect and to endorse and internalise the categories that we have inherited. Some of the existing established connections we have inherited may be or might have been useful, and they stuck, but looking back it now seems that as I drew these I must have been at a place in my life when I was asking, “what if there’s another way? What would it be like if the categories were not those ones, but some other organizational system? What might that be like? And then which one is true?”
Categories are a prison that condemns us to see things and each other in particular ways. Medicine and much of science used to be considered arts, but they were forcibly divorced, though as any mathematician or surgeon will tell you, deep down they are still arts. That separation may have had its uses but it also arrested the flow of many innovative ideas. This prison is one we have built ourselves, because it can be convenient and useful; at least it is at the moment each category and connection comes into being, but what might life be like on the outside?
—DB
New York, 2019