It was 20 years ago today not that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play but that I received a vision. Like any normal sadoo, I’ve had visions of everything from braless angels descending countless ladders in fluttery bliss from heaven onto my priapic bed … to vermiculous apocalypses so horrific the very retelling of them would kill you. But on January 25 1990, shortly before my final son was born, three de-wombed children sweetly farting in their sleep, in the happy desolate hours of the night, after an evening of far too many Brussels sprouts, I received a vision that united time, myth, nature, technology, humanity, art, and god; in the morning, over a breakfast of vast toddler demands and oatmeal, I determined that the vision was conceptually sound and imaginatively potent.
It was, I confess, a taxonomic vision. Which sounds less healthy than it should.
The sadoo - a human type I do not advocate but only describe in a shadowy attempt to name what I seem to be - is, among other things, a competent taxonomist. There are those, naturally, who despise taxonomists. Back in the days I mingled with the named, I met with Eric McLuhan - one of Marshall’s many Catholic-spawned children. More ignorant than I should have been about the politics of such a statement, I referred to Northrop Frye in a vaguely positive way; this provoked a terse dismissive response, of which academics seem to be particularly fond.
Frye, McLuhan said with religious and contemptuous finality, was a taxonomist.
What a vile tribe I belong to! I thought, pained and bleeding. How despised and rejected of people, humans of sorrows and acquainted with grief, are we taxonomists! I went home and built Lego fairies with my children to escape the horror of the new knowledge of what I was.
Even now, recalling that trauma, I find myself slightly weepy and realize I may not have the strength today to share my taxonomic vision with you. Please believe me: I so want to tell you what makes a beautiful taxonomy - one so magnificent politicians become poets and the Fortune 500 forget how to count. I so very very much want to tell you … when I’m ready for it, when you’re ready for it, when the world’s ready for it … what my perfect taxonomic vision is. But I must wait, Dearly Beloved, until the proper time.
It’s all about waiting. It’s all about the proper time.
In the meantime … to wet your pants … here’s what’s coming next … something you need, something you’ve been waiting for - a desperate lacuna in the very miasmic fabric of language: group names for groups that don’t have names. That is: if a bunch of crows is called a murder and a bunch of waterfowl is called a knob, what should a bunch of lawyers be called? A bunch of administrative assistants? Pimps? Desperados? Should they all be called a bunch? No. Oh no no no.
I have been given the names for such bunches, people. In another vision. And I shall share these names with you. I shall share them with you soon. And your lives shall be changed.
