Error.
And its emotions.
On the brink of error is a condition of fear.
In the midst of error is a state of folly and defeat.
Realising you've made an error brings shame and remorse.
Or does it?
Let's look into this.
Lots of people including Aristotle think error
an interesting and valuable mental event.
In his discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric
Aristotle says there are 3 kinds of words.
Strange, ordinary and metaphorical.
"Strange words simply puzzle us;
ordinary words convey what we know already;
it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something new & fresh"
(Rhetoric, 1410b10-13).
In what does the freshness of metaphor consist?
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself
in the act of making a mistake.
He pictures the mind moving along a plane surface
of ordinary language
when suddenly
that surface breaks or complicates.
Unexpectedness emerges.
At first it looks odd, contradictory or wrong.
Then it makes sense.
And at that moment, according to Aristotle,
the mind turns to itself and says:
"How true, and yet I mistook it!"
From the true mistakes of metaphor a lesson can be learned.
Not only that things are other than they seem,
and so we mistake them,
but that such mistakenness is valuable.
Hold onto it, Aristotle says,
there is much to be seen and felt here.
Metaphors teach the mind
to enjoy error
and to learn
from the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case.
There is a Chinese proverb that says,
Brush cannot write two characters with the same stroke
And yet
that is exactly what a good mistake does.
Here is an example.
It is a fragment of ancient Greek lyric
that contains an error of arithmetic.
The poet does not seem to know
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he is a master contriver--
or what Aristotle would call an "imitator"
of reality.
Imitation (mimesis in Greek)
is Aristotle's collective term for the true mistakes of poetry.
What I like about this term
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Yet something has changed in the quotient of our expectations.
For in mistaking them,
Alkman has perfected something.
Indeed he has
more than perfected something.
Using a single brushstroke.
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