June 05, 2001

Ampersand: Only artificial borders are binary


Ampersand: Views of the border

I considered the border of my country, not three hours from here, but there are also the borders I cross every day: the border between waking and sleeping; the border between land and water; the border between work and Life Outside. Unlike the artificial physical border of a state or a nation, none of those are binary states. That is, I am either in the United States, or, by stepping over an imaginary line, en los Estados Unitos Mexicanos. I could cheat the question and stand with one foot in each country, but the line is still there, infinitely thin and ultimately divisive.

The borders between countries are created things, human artifacts. They vary over time, and are sometimes in dispute, but once a border has been decided it is absolute. Fictional borders are mostly the same: through the wardrobe into Narnia, through the Border into Faerie in Emma Bull and Will Shetterley’s Borderlands; via the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. Natural borders are not so clearly delineated. (And is that why it took some time for Alice to get into Wonderland, or Dorothy into Oz, just because rabbit holes and cyclones are natural phenomena?)

When I fall asleep, I don’t (usually) just close my eyes and become unconscious; usually I drift off to sleep, and sometimes come awake in the middle of that process, to realize my mind has been free-associating wildly. When I wake up, on the rare occasions when I don’t have to force myself to jump out of bed at the summons of an alarm clock, I come to consciousness, slide back into semi-sleeping mid-drift, come awake again, open one eye a crack, close it, open the other one, and gradually convince myself to get out of bed.

When I step into a lake, as I do several mornings a week before rowing, I start on dry sand, walk out to wet sand and still wetter sand, come to the point where I am actually in the water but so shallowly that the tops of my feet are still dry, and carefully step down a slope into knee-deep water. If, on the other hand, I were launching my boat form an artificial dock, the line between land and water would be more clear-cut.

The border between work (a job) and the rest of life has become increasingly artificial, over the course of the Industrial and Information Revolutions. For a primitive hunter-gatherer, there might not be a distinction at all, just different tasks: hunting, gathering, cooking, caring for babies, teaching children, making houses or clothing, singing, storytelling. On a farm a century ago, there would be work to be done in the house and work to be done in the barns and fields. The work might be divided up and done by different people (or different genders) but I’m not sure there was much concept of free time, just things to do, some of which you liked more than others. Even today, the boundaries of my office job are fuzzy. First there’s the commute to work, during which I’m not at work and not getting paid, but not free to do something else, either. I can do some work at home, or take a private phone call or have a silly conversation at work, and there are occasional social activities sponsored by or springing from my job. How to class those?

Even those natural borders that seem definite, such as that between a leaf and the air around it, are fuzzy, at the microscopic level. The leaf-molecules exchange atoms with the air-molecules, water vapor passes through both, and electrons dance from atoms to atom. Only artificial borders are binary.

Posted by dichroic at June 5, 2001 11:31 AM
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?