containers

in my room once again..messiness everywhere. i just reached down to pick up a water bottle and two little sunnyd bottles. then i wondered. holding the bottles, i asked spiro, "how many containers do you think are in this room?"

there were boxes, bottles, cans, and bags popping up everywhere i looked. i said, "250?"

he stared blankly at me.
"600?" i followed up.

again..blank stare
"hmm..like 450? i have no idea what the best guess would be" - my last bait for response

gave it a few seconds and spiro said, "well what are containers? i mean my books contain pages."

perfectttt!

so what counts as a container?
depends on your definition..

could be anything that participates in the act of containing..and to contain is to either "have or hold within" or consist of/be made up of. this pretty much labels all of existence as containers of one thing or other. maybe we should turn to a more modest use of the term.

well i turned to the trusty wolframalpha search engine to give me a concise and understandable definition of container. and boy was it concise and unambiguous:

now that definition is different than the other and it should be more in line with what you'd think of upon hearing the word - container (except the bit in parenthesis..that is awfully specific referring to the act of containerization - learned that word just now..it's like the standardized method of transporting large quantities of stuff like on trains and boats and shit).

so we know bottles and bags and the like are containers according to both definitions, but what about the book? well, because people are clever, books can be used to hold things physically, but that is not their purpose. what they are meant to hold are ideas. They are receptacles for storing and retrieving ideas, but they differ from other containers in that when we retrieve the object being stored - the ideas - they are not removed. Once stored, they seem to have some sort of permanence to the nature of the book. This permanence can be surpassed with a simple tear though. Pages can always be torn out and shared the way a mirror can be pulled from a purse and passed around a group of friends. In virtue of that, I'd have to consent with spiro and say that books do seem to be containers for their containment of pages. They also seem to contain ideas, but that is probably only due to my assumption that pages can contain ideas. Pages hold ideas or parts of ideas and when put together in a book, the collective ideas held by the pages are then held by the book. So, the book then contains the ideas. But pages and books both hold words. Do ideas hold words or do words hold ideas?

so the word is container. one who writes is a writer. one who sings is a singer. the actor performing the verb is understood as the doer of the verb and to abbreviate, we can just label the actor as the verb + "er" - one who contains is a container. using the words one and actor probably signify some sort of sentience or aware identity but i just mean one being of existence. there is no reason to think that the actor must be aware of its action. broilers broil. recorders record. and aircraft carriers carry aircraft. Containers contain.

i'm being impractical right now, but every object of existence should be called a container since, in order for us to have any understanding of it, we must recognize the characteristics contained or held by its identity. practically, we will label things for their functionality as containers - like bottles, boxes, and bags - but we should be aware that containment is an essential aspect of existence and that all things are containers because, in some sense, they can always be considered to contain some other thing.