Hunting the wild Brooklyn taxicab
This weekend I went down to New York to see a friend of mine who was in town for a conference, and took the opportunity to visit some Cambridge friends who had moved to Brooklyn last month. I like walking in New York–I find it oddly relaxing, in the same way stimulants can sometimes help people with hyperactivity to calm down. Go figure. So on Saturday, the day I planned to visit my Brooklyn friends, I wandered down from my Midtown hotel to Greenwich Village, and then Soho, and then decided, the heck with it, instead of trying to figure out the subway I’ll just walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and grab a cab on the other side. It’s fun to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a nice day.
I asked a traffic cop which way Park Slope was, so that I could get a cab that was going in the right direction, and started off. Great plan, except for one detail: there are no cabs in Brooklyn that are not already in service. So I walked, and kept walking.
And walked all the way from Midtown Manhattan to Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Now, there was a moment at which I decided to commit to walking the entire way, because I knew I was going in the right direction and would get there eventually, and once you’ve been walking for three hours, what’s another hour or two? And it would be worth it to see my friends’ reaction. But there was a good long stretch of Flatbush Avenue in which I was really, really hoping to find a cab.
And here’s what didn’t occur to me until Sunday morning: I could have gone into any store or restaurant, asked someone for the number of a cab company, and called one.
How could I not have realized this?
I interrogated myself about this some (because while Saturday afternoon I’d hit the zone and could have kept walking indefinitely, on Sunday morning my butt and thighs were making their opinion of my non-cab-taking ways felt). And here’s what I think was going on. I think in some deep, unconscious way, I was thinking of taxicabs as though they were a sort of animal with two subspecies: domestic and wild. Domestic cabs are the ones that come to your house, the cabs you call, as you would call a dog. Wild cabs are the cabs you encounter on the street, that cannot be called, but can only be caught. Once you have entered the street, the native habitat of the wild taxicab, you can’t call one, any more than you can go on a safari and call the rhinos (or dangeroos) to come in closer for photographs. You have to catch them. (Thanks to my two anonymous FB friends for those links, which aren’t all that relevant but are hilarious.)
So: domestic = house = calling v. wild = outside = catching.
This leads me to three things:
1. Metaphors are fundamental to the way we think. Yes, I know this was a particularly weird metaphor, but there is a whole field of linguistics and cognitive science that is based around metaphor and thought. I don’t mean highly conscious, literary metaphors and similes that are deliberately created for a combination of novelty and recognizability, but basic ones, so basic that they don’t even seem like metaphors at first, but simply like descriptions of how things are. Look at the way we characterize the development of careers, relationships, and so forth as physical journeys forward or upward: “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” “My Harvard MBA has put me ahead in my career.” “My workout routine has plateaued.” “Now that I’ve got tenure I don’t know where to go next.”
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, list a number of what they call “primary metaphors,” including:
Affection is Warmth
Important is Big
Happy is Up
Knowing is Seeing
These are based on our immediate physical experiences (that of being held closely; realizing one’s relative impotence in the face of bigger people; naturally becoming more posturally erect or even jumping when happy; and taking in information visually). Other metaphors we learn through culture. If I didn’t live in a culture that had both domesticated and wild animals, I wouldn’t have unconsciously come up with the metaphor that I did for taxis.
In American society, for example, a dominant metaphor is that “time is money.” On the surface, this only seems to mean that the more you work, the more you will succeed. But if you dig deeper, it goes beyond that: time is a resource. Time can be used well, or wasted. Time can be spent or saved. Time is something we can invest (“I need to put more time into that project”). Time is something there is a finite amount of. Although some people have more or less time than others, time itself is the same for everyone, just as $10 in Bill Gates’s pocket is the same as $10 in mine. Not all cultures have these beliefs about time.
Metaphors can enrich our thinking, but as you can see through my error with the taxis, they can also constrain it.
2. What does it mean to know something, and what does that imply for the testing and evaluation of knowledge? I have no doubt that had the possibility of calling a cab from a restaurant appeared on a multiple-choice or true-or-false test,* I would have answered correctly. In fact, just the night before, my friend had mentioned calling cabs from restaurants in the context of drinking-and-driving laws, and I certainly didn’t say, “What is this strange custom of which you speak?”
I “knew” you could do this, but I obviously didn’t know you could do this. So what does that say about the validity of multiple-choice and true-or-false tests that are based on the ability to recognize information, but not to recall or to apply it? Nothing good, I fear.
3. Dude, I walked from Midtown to Park freakin’ Slope! According to Google Maps, I walked about seven miles, but I couldn’t make it take the path I’d actually used, which involved a lot of wandering up and down and around in Manhattan before hitting the bridge. My normal pace is a little over three miles an hour, and I walked for a little over four hours, so you do the math. A 12-mile walk may be a lot for you or a little, but it’s a lot for me. Endurance has never been my strong suit and even a couple of years ago, I would not have been able to complete a walk like that going non-stop. So I was rather proud of myself.
Which got me thinking, don’t most of us have stories of things we are simultaneously embarrassed about yet proud of? I’m not hugely embarrassed about my unconscious belief that taxicabs are animals, but I do pride myself on being a good problem-solver, and I failed rather spectacularly to be that.
My current theory is that the basic structure of the shame-with-pride story (and I’d love to hear some of yours!) is that you are embarrassed about/ashamed of the stupidity or ignorance that got you into a given situation, and then proud of the stamina/competence that allowed you to either endure, change, or get out of the situation.
Embarrassed to go into the situation, proud to get out of it.
See? That there’s one of them “life is a journey” metaphors.
*Maybe. From the time I was a little girl until now, I have done badly on true-or-false tests. Even as a child, there were very few statements that seemed unequivocally true or false to me; I needed to know the context in which they were meant to be applied in order to judge, not that I would have put it that way in third grade. So then I’d get all weird and start thinking it was a trick question and put the wrong answer down.
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Yes, wow! Walking that kind of distance sheds a whole new light on a town. That means you could ‘easily’ walk home from Fenway Park, or the Garden, if you were so inclined; which is nice to know.
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I still have some cleverness points with a friend with whom I was out walking the ‘hidden gardens of Cambridge’ tour a couple of years ago. We wanted to jump to a totally different part of town, and had (naturally) left our cars at home, and I was the one who spotted the cab company’s phone number on the doors of the occupied cabs.
This may not have been true in Brooklyn, because there actually are two species of cabs in NYC–I don’t know if the gypsy cabs wear their contact info on their sleeves the way a Brattle cab does here.
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I’m right with you on the true-false test.
Why isn’t there a ‘that depends’ option?
Or fractional truth, as in fuzzy math?
One of the things I still carry around from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is the Japanese word ‘mu.’ Accurding to Pirsig, it means something like ‘un-ask the question’ or ‘the scope of the answer is too big for the size of the question.’
Sounds handy, for overly philosophical types like us.
I actually have a similar story. I was at a friend’s house rather late one night and called a cab to come get me. I bade my friends goodbye and went downstairs to wait. And I waited and waited and waited. For most of an hour. At that point I didn’t want to go back upstairs and probably wake my friends up so they could call the cab company again (this was before I had a cell phone). So I started walking. I was very tired when I started and it took me almost 2 hours to walk home, so I was really not pleased to get there. I kept hoping to see a cab on the way, but I never did. It wasn’t that far, but it was 2 am when I started, so it was an adventure I would rather have avoided.
My fiance and I were on vacation in CA a few years ago, to visit a friend who lives out there. The friend told us not to rent a car because she could drive us around.
Then, her work schedule changed and she could no longer drive us.
One crazy say we walked from Santa Monica to Venice beach. (Which according to google maps should be about 45 minutes of walking, but I know it was much longer for us.) By the time we got to our destination we were so exausted that we stopped at a movie theater and got tickets to the next movie that was playing, “Doogal”, just so we would have an air conditioned place to sit.
That choice turned into another hilarious adventure because we were the only 2 people in the theater. Doogal was such a bad movie that 1/2 way through we started calling our friend on our cell phones, while still in the theater.
We had a lot of transportation issues on our trip to CA (like trying to use buses to get around LA, BIG mistake) but we attribute it to being from Boston and being used to a walking city that has easy to use public transportation.
There’s a great site that lets you map out running/walking routes: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/
Would be easy to figure out how far you went.
Your walking from midtown to Park Slope makes me envious! Although anything related to Park Slope makes me envious these days….it was my stomping ground for about a year or so. There were times when I was tempted to walk from school up in the west 50s of Manhattan to where I lived on the slope on 4th avenue…but when you’re tired and hungry, a miles long walk is a no no.
And as far as the calling a cab thing….my Manhattanite friends are completely flabbergasted by that and get completely tripped up by it when they go to Brooklyn. In the future, if you’re wandering the slope, I have a number for a car service I used to use routinely. They’re reasonably priced and were a godsend many a drunken night.
Also I read on the globe blog that you used one of the chinatown busses. Not that I have anything against them, but you should investigate bolt or megabus on your next trip. Guaranteed seat on a guaranteed departure time and wi-fi. Bolt has power outlets as well. When I would return to NH from Brooklyn, I would take Bolt to Boston, then transfer to the commuter bus to NH.
Funny you should say that about true-or-false tests–I worked with a professor once who studied mindfulness, and one of the methods she used to evaluate it was a series of statements that could each be marked “always true,” “never true,” or “sometimes true” (I may have the wording off a bit). Your mindfulness was measured by your number of “sometimes trues.” Now, I always wondered if a test laid out like that wasn’t more likely to increase mindfulness than accurately measure it, but regardless, you can congratulate yourself on a high level of mindfulness from an early age!
Twelve miles is a great accomplishment in my eyes, even if it really tired you out and left you with sore muscles. I can no longer walk for that length of time due to a bad back.
And one problem with estimating distance and time with Google and the like is that I don’t think they take topography into account.
I’m going to ruminate some more to recall metaphors I don’t realize I use on a regular basis.
Carolyn, I did occasionally walk from Emmanuel College to Harvard Square when I worked in one and lived in the other! Not a bad walk at all.
It’s funny how driving gives you absolutely no sense of distance, somehow. When I was back in KC, which is a HUGE car culture, I was shocked to realize how many places were within what I now consider easy walking distance. (And not just because I’m fitter–I could have done a 15-minute walk even then. I took just such a walk between two locales that I never would have thought to walk between when I lived there. My KC friends said they had no idea that you could walk from X to Y that easily.)
TG, thanks–that sounds like a good site. I’ll check it out.
Veronica–long conversations about the quality of various buses have been taking place on my FB. I will check out the Bolt next time. And if I don’t like it any better than Fung Wah, I’m popping for the train. It’s not like a trip to NY is ever *in*expensive, anyway.
Jenny1144–there can be a thin line between “mindfulness” and “second-guessing yourself all over creation,” can’t there? At least there is for me!
Everybody has their own needs/desires when they travel. I just HATE navigating around chinatown in NYC with luggage. I did it once to meet my mom’s class trip, and NEVER AGAIN.
I like comfy seats, toilets that flush, and electric outlets. So Bolt served my purposes very well. However there are others who love the chaos and sense of survival of the chinatown bus.
Robin sez: there can be a thin line between “mindfulness” and “second-guessing yourself all over creation,” can’t there? At least there is for me!
I perceive a big difference actually – being mindful is simply being aware, it doesn’t contain any intellectual judgment about rightness and wrongness. Being mindful is not being thinking-ful. See the difference?
#2 I find there’s a big difference between knowing something and knowing about something. You can read all you want about the flowers in the field, and know how long the stamens are and under what conditions they are pollinated. It’s very much not the experience of being able to recognize that flower in a field because you have smelled it so many times, in so many seasons. You can read all the cookbooks you want, it’s not the same as baking and eating a pie. There’s a whole other set of both sensual knowledge and experiential knowledge…even above and beyond “I know what pie tastes like now.” When you know something (and not just know about something), you have a different, more complex relationship to it.
#1, I live in stories and metaphors. I am quite sure that Gilgamesh Explains It All For You (or at least for me)! Those particular primary metaphors don’t say much to me, but it might be my immersion and down-home comfort with “eastern” thinking. (I loved and grokked the yin/yang transformation metaphor of BSG, it made so much *sense* to me.)
#3 – I have about a brazilian stories that are me being bravely stupid. Battling poison ivy barehanded, or refusing to call 911 for anaphylactic shock. But I live for those experiences of knowing. (Insert joke about dying for those experiences too…)
You walked an impressive awesome distance! Was it really a “mistake” that could have been engineered better? Cause you sure are getting some awesome insights and conversation out of it. No shame in that. It’s all in how you pitch it to yourself.
Magicbean, I have heard you say “She is a very warm person,” so at least one of those primary metaphors means something to you! And haven’t you ever said, “I need to work through X”? That’s life-as-a-journey, with X as some difficult terrain to navigate.
It’s hard to grasp at first how really, really basic those primary ones are.
That’s true. But I have also spoken of the critical importance of a tiny snowflake. When I’m happy, I also feel “grounded”. Knowing comes from the heart and the belly as well as the eyes…or seeing is not believing. When I think of the caring of nurses, I think of their cool calmness. And so on. If you expand the primaries to include the idea that everything contains within it the potential for its opposite…then OK. Yin yang and all. Also, uh, I’m ornery and contrarian. Death to the “true/false” tests!
We’re not disagreeing, it’s just that I’m trying to condense about a decade’s worth of scholarly work into two paragraphs, so I’m not doing justice to the complexity–and radical simplicity–of the concept. The basic notion of the primary metaphors is all about the body. So knowing is seeing, but knowing is also hearing (“I hear you”), eating (“I devoured that book”) and so on.
Aha, now I get you better! Oh, god, yes, if primary metaphors are about the basics of human perception.
A bunch of my friends are taking the Myers-Briggs fb version.
I looked at it, but I’m getting stuck at “That depends” on all those questions, too;
nor can I make sense of the resulting characteristic labels as opposites.
Is there a type for that?