to error
Error could be a verb – yes, I know, we already have “to err”, but that’s not exactly what I’m thinking of – for something we want to do rather than a noun-boundary fencing off a territory we’ve been taught to dread.
The Oxford English Dictionary allows that, in fact, it was once this way, or at least that error was once one of those nouns that names an action, in this case the action of wandering. But this sense of error, the OED tells me, is now reserved for poets, and the spell checker on my word processor warns me with a wavy red underscore that “erroring” isn’t correct.
What if we all are poets, shaping ourselves out of words, day by day? What would I have to risk and let fall away to perform the grammatical alchemy of erroring off through a forest, or a boat, or down an alleyway? To be on the side of erroring, of the knight errant, of Don Quixote, with Julio, is to be on the side of trying, essaying, experimenting and experiencing, and of encountering, discovering, inventing the unknown at home and abroad.
To move like the knight on the chessboard: oblique, unpredictable, never directly forward. This sort of error, this roaming and wandering must seem to many, to the sober who can walk the straight line (I’m one of them too, so I know), to the scholar who can plot the outline, the near-dead riveted by the benevolent, blinding light at the end of the tunnel; to all of these, this must seem like a lack of rigor. A part of me worries about this appearance of absence of rigor and feels apologetic. Sometimes a part of me dons a habit and slaps me with the nun’s ruler for being slack.
And then a part of me asks: why so much stiffness? Isn’t there something eerie about the connection between rigor and rigor mortis? Why do we call them “stiffs,” after all? Can’t the stiff, straight line bend? Or dissolve? Or better yet, can we play along it, on it, beside it? Like a cartoon character who begins by walking along a straight black line that might be the edge of a road, then stoops to pick it up and ties it effortlessly into a lasso, only to finally, clumsily wrap it around his own feet [Ù13, 19, 62]. Can’t we just play dead? Just that.
I’m not wanting to be, or to make of Julio, an absolute errorist. He too, no doubt, had his systems. God knows I do. But then, “the good Romantic also had a method for doing his tie in the style of the day.”1 I just want more space to error, more room for error to stretch its odd limbs and unfurl its welcome dimensions, to invite me on a trip, to show me the side of being wrong that’s neither embarrassing nor diminishing, but simply learning — and so, miraculously, expanding (though never self-inflating).
I’d like to slip and fall and laugh because of what I’ve discovered on the ground that I’ve not seen, would not have seen before and because …because, well, it’s funny to slip and fall and be on the ground when I think of my self as a creature that stands and walks.
1 Julio Cortázar, Imagen de John Keats [1950-1951] (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997) p. 15, my translation.