Curmie hasn’t written a blog piece in over 20 months, and at
first glance, at least, this seems an odd choice of topic with which to break
silence. But there’s a twist coming;
hear me out, OK?
One of those internet riddles has been circulating for a
while now; Curmie’s seen it three or four times. There are a couple of variations, but the
essential elements remain the same. One
version goes like this:
OK math versus English people, and
everyone else… Here you go:
The battle of Mathematics and
English. Let’s see who can get it right 🧐
Question:
1 rabbit saw 9 elephants while
going to the river. Every elephant saw 3 monkeys going to the river. Each
monkey had 1 tortoise in each hand.
How many animals are going to the
river?
The question inevitably leads to a host of “wrong” answers
because, you see, “you need to read really carefully,” quoth one of Curmie’s
friends who posted it. If you, Gentle
Reader, don’t want to know “the answer,” stop here.
OK, so the “correct” answer in 10. (Or at least that’s what was counted as
correct on a friend’s Facebook page; Curmie wouldn’t be surprised if someone
else decided 0 is the correct answer; see four paragraphs down.) There’s the rabbit who sees the elephants while
going to the river. There are three
monkeys “going to the river,” carrying two tortoises apiece (presuming that the
correct nomenclature for simian appendages would be two hands and two legs). The elephants aren’t necessarily going to the
river, and they all could have seen the same three monkeys. So: 1 rabbit + 3 monkeys + 6 tortoises = 10
animals.
Except, Dear Reader,
if you’ll pardon the expression, that’s bullshit. Notice the key words in the
explanation: “necessarily,” “could have.”
The elephants might well have also been going to the river; the set-up
doesn’t say they aren’t, it just doesn’t say they are. Rabbits are pretty quick; the rabbit might
have passed them. In an exercise that
purports to be about close reading, it’s pretty sloppy to say the rabbit merely
saw the elephants. He (I’m making
the rabbit male for pronoun purposes) could have “met” them if the intention
was to exclude them from the tally: in this case they’d be either stationary or
moving away from the river.
Similarly, there’s nothing to indicate that the elephants
were grouped together, so it’s perfectly possible that the monkeys each one saw
were all different. They could
have been the same, but we don’t know that. In other words, there might have been
1 rabbit + 9 elephants + 27 monkeys + 54 tortoises = 91 animals all going to
the river.
Moreover, the question isn’t how many of these
animals are going to the river. It’s how
many animals. What about the
zebras and the kangaroos and the tigers?
(Let’s make this a truly international zoological exercise!) The fact that we don’t know about them
doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just as Juneteenth was celebrated before POTUS
knew of its existence and people infected by COVID-19 have the virus whether or
not they’ve been diagnosed. So there may
be hundreds, even thousands, of animals going to the river. The question wasn’t “what is the minimum
number of animals going to the river?” or “how many of these animals do
we know are going to the river?”
But—as they say on the late-night infomercials—wait, there’s
more! Notice the tense shift. The descriptions are all in the past tense:
“saw” (twice) and “had.” But the
question is in the present tense: “are going.”
All of the specifically mentioned animals may indeed still be going to
the river, or they might have gone to the river and are already home
watching Netflix. The monkeys may have
been seen carrying the tortoises at some point in the past but decided that was
too much work and put them down.
Etc. In other words, the only really
correct answer to the question is WE DON’T KNOW.
But what Curmie realized upon waking up in the middle of the
night was not his own Grammar Nazism; that’s hardly news. Rather, the failure of this riddle as an
exercise in close reading or logic may make it an ideal metaphor for
contemporary events. What if each animal
represents a Person of Color (no, Curmie isn’t
saying that POCs are animals: this is for analogy purposes only),
and “going to the river” means being beaten, choked, shot, or otherwise brutalized by the police?
That makes George Floyd, for example, the rabbit. He was unquestionably “going to the river,”
as were many of the others whose names have been invoked of late: Breonna
Taylor, Sandra Bland, et al. Of particular interest here are
the elephants, who, for the sake of this analogy, might be said to represent those who have been assaulted by police but we don't know the circumstances (let's be fair: police do have the right to legitimate force in self-defense, for example). Because we don’t know
whether they’re going to the river, the “correct” answer assumes that they
aren’t. In terms of the riddle, it’s an
unspoken rule to exclude “irrelevant” details.
But in real life, we have those unspoken rules, too. We’ve been acculturated to believe absence of evidence is evidence of absence, that “going
to the river” only happens when we’re certain: when there’s a video, for example. But now more than
ever, we need to examine the assumptions upon which our conclusions are
based. Such is the essence of epic
theatre and of engaged citizenship alike. Are one or more of those elephants, in other
words, actually going to the river?
Silence in this case borders on willful ignorance, and does not merely fail to reveal the truth, but actively conceals it.
Even more telling is the omission of other animals—the
zebras, kangaroos, and tigers I mentioned—who were also going to the river, but
whose stories aren’t even deemed worthy of mention: those for whom “going to
the river” is so much a part of daily life that it doesn’t bear mentioning. Perhaps they are heading not to the river per se, but to a stream that feeds it: not violence, in the terms of our analogy, but “stop and search,” inappropriate interrogation, or slow response times.
Of course, if what’s really important about the riddle is
the tense shift, the fact is that we don’t know where any of those animals are going
now. Maybe now the elephants are
going to the river and the rabbit isn’t.
Maybe the monkeys have been to the river, returned, and are going back again. We can be sure, however, that the past does
indeed impact the present; pretending that all incidents of river-going are in
the past is not merely naïve, but reckless.
Finally, of course, there’s the realization that wherever our
little scenario plays out—in the jungle, the grasslands, or the tundra—virtually
every animal will sooner or later go to the river, or at least to one of its tributaries. Here is where we can but pray our analogy
breaks down.
But we all know it doesn’t.
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