Daniel Gordon, Three Green Vessels, 2022
The eye will scan, searching for something to want or something that wants. The yearning of all the objects in the room. There can be greater peace in a Cotswolds cottage of country opulence than a minimalist flat. How would Marie Kondo explain this phenomenon? Here we have ginghams and plaids, overstuffed couches bursting with plush pillows in mismatched ikat prints, gallery walls of a hundred tiny landscapes, mirrors and candelabra over a hearth with a roaring fire, rugs, tapestries, armoires, crowded bookshelves, riotous floral arrangements containing whole branches of trees, ceiling to floor draperies in velvet or damask, ruffles, scallops, an upholstered bed, an upholstered ottoman, chintz tablecloths, chintz bedskirts, gold Renaissance fabric wallpapers, thick evergreen garlands, a kitchen table groaning under goblets, pitchers, decanters, silver, crystal, dessert plates atop salad plates atop dinner plates, flaky pastries exploding with berries, animals roasted inside other animals. Or some such. The objects comfort each other. They put each other down for a nap, extend their claws in contented stretches.
While a room with one potted plant and a chair shrieks like the Earl of Lemongrab, clutching its own nakedness, retracting against the chill of space tumbling headlong into more space.
In childhood we see a canonical text—The Nutcracker, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland—confirming what we’ve always known: the world of objects lives independently of us, magically and fearsomely, and anything with a face indubitably has the subjectivity we ourselves enjoy. Adults frequently dismiss children and treat objects roughly, so we develop a kinship with the so-called inanimate, the secretly animate.
“Bloch considers the possibility that the subservience of things is only their front, the part of them that is turned towards us, and that they actually ‘belong to another world, one only interspersed into this one.’ He suspects that, behind their subservience, things lead an irrational life of their own that runs counter to human intentions.”
Minimalism is a response to consumerism, to the evil of ugly, cheap, mass-produced objects piling up in corners, immediately shabby, broken and without utility. Maximalism is a response to minimalism, and the current créme de la créme of interior design is deadstock, vintage, handcrafts. The thrift and trash decor of our youth staged, prop-styled, and marked up. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, capitalism adapts to resource depletion by reviving the trends of our great-grandparents, and we bop along.
“Beautiful crafted things warm the heart. The warmth of the hands is passed on to the things. Mechanical coldness does away with the warmth of things. In modernity, things cool down and become intractable objects.”
My neighbor recently fled her post-doctoral assignment—we all have our troubles—and begged me to take her cheap manufactured furniture. I’m desperate to get rid of it; it’s offgassing chemicals and plotting against me in the cold and blank North room. The harsh lines, particle board and polyester upholstery, blacks and grays and metals stiffen me to the rigidity of a corpse. How could you have anything but corpse sex on such a bed, corpse leisure on such a couch? The Cryptkeeper bolts out of his coffin cackling. I feel relief when Colette vomits on the gray rug—now it has some life. The whole back of the house sinks into the earth under the weight of these corrupt void-objects. They belong in J.G. Ballard’s High Rise as provocateurs of degeneration and violence. The purely utilitarian is not utilitarian at all.
I took my Pentax to work and photographed my favorite cook’s hands as he worked. I’d like to put one of the images on a poster with the text: MANUAL LABOR IS SKILLED LABOR. He gives me a hug every day; he gives massages and does reiki and finds pressure points when we have headaches or stress maladies. He’s such a gentle, thoughtful person; it’s funny to imagine trying to replace him with—what—a microwave, massage chair, and chatbot?
“Heidegger is strongly dedicated to work and to the hand, as if he sensed that the human being of the future would be handless....Heidegger called thinking handwork: ‘Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is handwork.’ The hand makes thinking a decidedly analogue process.” I don’t quite know what he’s talking about, but I love the notion that the analog machinations of the mind equate to those of the hands—it makes me think of Svankmajer’s work. We’d never find computer chips or touchscreens, but we might open our chests to discover a set of golden gears.
In Nickel and Dimed, “Ehrenreich attacks the notion that low-wage jobs require only unskilled labor. She found that manual labor required highly demanding feats of stamina, focus, memory, quick thinking, and fast learning.”
Anyone who’s had a manual labor job already knows this. Maybe it’s news to lifelong academics or the royal family or trial lawyers. I could give many examples, and have rambled long enough, but I’m reminded of a short documentary about tower climbers—workers who climb cell towers to make repairs. It’s incredible, like being an electrician and a rock climber at the same time, as though both activities don’t require the entirety of one’s attention. Naturally the corporations who contract out this work demand it be done at such a pace that there isn’t time to use safety equipment, and so unprecedented numbers of workers fall to their deaths.
Industrial dishwashing is like if you combined tetris with a tough mudder. Grab a plate without knocking your hat into the compost; lean towards the belt without falling into the drain; pivot between cart and sprayer; choose between losing dexterity with thick rubber gloves or burning your hands on hot china; keep a lookout for grease spills. On Saturday night I worked right up to the cusp of a panic attack, then walked out. For hours I’d been working with people whose competence dwindled as the workload swelled. One colleague contentedly ate a bowl of ice cream while another dug through the trash. Yet another washed one pan over and over. The managers could be heard laughing in the office. Not to put too fine a point, but the difference between working with competent (skilled) and incompetent (unskilled) colleagues could be life or death.
So what’s the end of this essay? I can’t go on, I must go on? Sure. I deeply loved Byung-Chul Han’s book, Non-things. It eases the discomfort I feel in certain spaces to understand the sources of that discomfort. It guides me outside, away from modernity. It inspires me to empty my home of soulless junk. But my favorite section was about “the poem as a beautiful body,” the distinction between the pornographic—information—and the erotic—ambiguity, secrecy, mysteries. The pornographic will, literally and figuratively, never satisfy us. There is no end to the—forgive me—fucking information. To solve this vocational riddle, we need poetics, erotics.
“Reading is not a hermeneutic but a haptic act, a touch, a caress. Reading snuggles up to the skin of the poem. It enjoys the poem’s body. The poem, as a body, makes us feel a special presence beyond the realm of representation, the realm to which hermeneutics is dedicated.”
For anyone exhausted by political art, discursive language, artists’ statements, tweets—how nice to be still, to be a body, to be a stratum through which rhythm moves.
My love affair goes bad, and the archangel manager writes, “we’ve rubixed the cube.” How clear from this perspective that every text message exhausts and dispirits, is hunger for contact that can never be realized, while simply existing in the deep warmth of presence, brushing against, the vibration of speech, rights and fills all the cups.
Merry Christmas, my kind readers! Whether a bustling family affair or the snowfallen stillness of hermit life, I hope you have an enfolded, embodied respite.
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