T. S. Eliot did not know what he was talking about. When I was in London, staying, in, of all places, off Kensington Gardens, sort of -- DeVere Road, I walked and walked and walked, and trust what is the first blue-placque I encounter: Eliot's.
Anyway, Grice loved cats too, and would refer to their inability to create value, though ("Reply to Richards" -- "cats, charming creatures as they are").
And he never found it difficult to name them.
His first cat he called Moraga.
His second, Oakland.
His third, Sausalito.
Now, you find the Wittgensteinian pattern of the rule, there!
Answer on a postcard to the Swimming-Pool Library.
JLS
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'Their inability to create value'.
ReplyDeleteCorrect, but only half the story. What about their ability to destroy value? Well, alright, to destroy anything _of value_.
Right. And this is feedback enough for me to now google the Reply to Richards and see what cats are supposed to do.
ReplyDeleteOddly, today Monday -- I slept at the Villa Speranza yesterday, all very relaxing. With my _cat_. This one lives mostly in the outdoors, and loves the Villa and its surroundings. But early in the morning he would wake me up and jump to my bed. All very charming.
Incidentally, my friend P. Stone, in Lit-ideas, loves cats, too, and so does his son, Matthew, aged 2.5. He cointed, Stone, did, a lovely word which I shared with Classics-L. Sillygistic. Sillygism. The conversation with his child:
M: Dad, the cat is purring.
P: And you know why?
M: Because he is a cat.
We found that this sillygism is invalid. But still Paul has renamed his son "Bertrand". It´s all publicly in Lit-Ideas. I shared the point with M. Chase in the Classics-L list and he said,
¨Well, no wonder¨ -- and he said this publicly, too -- that you should write about sillygism, thereof you know´. I replied that it means ´blessed´in Old English, but I still think that most deductive arguments are silly in that they bless you with analysis and a tautological sense of existence.
Cheers,
JLS
I have expanded elsewhere on all this, under the keyword "feline implicature". Enjoy!
ReplyDeleteNotably, the point was that the third 'name' for a cat, according to Eliot, is an otiose one. ("Nobody uses it").
ReplyDelete