Things about things

New York Objects (2010)

I’ve never been good at taking care of physical things. I break my toys. I become confused when I can’t walk through them or when repeated mistreatment causes them to fail. And yet I can develop hopelessly sentimental attachments to physical objects. I think part of my mistreatment of objects comes from a hind-brain feeling that the most noble life for any object is to be loved and worn to death and, if at all possible, repaired and worn to death again ad nauseum.

My jeans when I was growing up, some of which I still have, are a testament to this. I picked holes in the knees (always the first place to go, at the time I was comprised almost exclusively of bones and stubbornness) then patched the holes with denim and thick embroidery thread, wore holes in the patches to embroider and patch again… and all the time a growing maze of penmarks and doodles until my legs became a shifting, abstract work of art, the fabric worn so thin it was like a second tattoo.

I am one of the few people I know of my generation who has repeatedly darned their socks. How could I abandon things that had given me such good service just because they they were worn out at the heel… and at the base of my toes… and had holes from my razor sharp toenails? That seemed tragically insensitive and ageist to me.

New York Objects (2010)

I am an atheist. But the thing-ness of things is resonant, soothing and at times anxious making for me. I know it is a fabrication made from the way I tell myself the story of my life; but I worry about how my books are feeling if I haven’t touched them for some time. It is not all anxiety making, this choice to connect to the story of things, the stories of the non-human allows me to find delight in the perfect grey rock on the side of the road, replete in it’s self-ness.

Rocks are my friends. I do not need them to reciprocate this friendship, they are. Rocks are good training for love in general. Love does not demand reciprocation, it is a complete pleasure in itself. Love does not demand that you stand there while rocks are thrown at your head either.

Objects are extraordinary vessels, strong and vulnerable. They will always be themselves and yet at the same time they can be swept away from themselves and become powerful receptacles of memory, culture and storytelling. There is no limit to their symbolism.