Intimacy

Thing Intimacy

8 THING INTIMACY 1. She places two ladybug magnets on her refrigerator. The ladybugs are red with black spots, good luck belongings handed down to her, circuitously. Imagine animating your things so they could simply fly over, while you remain stationary. Underneath, none of them are solid, just like you, replete with rabid energies in motion, subatomic bed-rocking. Listen up when deploying above-board coarse-grained mimicries. You’ll mainly notice a thing if it breaks or goes away, viz., in selling the house, we had to discard many things our elders had accumulated. Doorstops, bookends live on past them as depreciating testimonials, along with the trees and shrubs they planted. Yet you are not supposed to want for too many things, a desire for things not considered a higher order of wanting. Still, she remembers a story about a boy who was bored with his everyday things, so they all went away. Except for one sympathetic blanket, he had to sit on the ground naked and shivering. Fancy the set of communal axioms aimed at that boy’s thing hatred. My things cry out to be dusted or at least touched: cookbooks, rocking chair, copper-plated teapot anticipating heirloom ontology. She asks me if I want to live with her: what about my things? 9 There are latent obligations hanging over you, not just things. The afghan’s red squares, held together by white borders, organizes homegrown flight paths by way of the deceased crocheter’s fingers. There were many more of those charming magnets, but my brother threw them away. Quick, touch that thing! There are things she needs to do today, laundry first, among them. Bring me that blue thing from that closet; put it over there with those other things to be taken away. Was that a sex cry or a cat cry, from the neighbors? Here’s the thing. Suppose that __________________. Suppose that she supposes a spirit residing in the ladybug magnets on the surface of the refrigerator doing a spirited ladybug thing. You have been invited to speak on behalf of what things? In the living room closet she keeps two purloined x-rays of her skull, from which to develop a thinged intimacy with her head’s interior: brain, eyesockets, sinuses. The boy’s things did come back when he said he was sorry, extending a here-there liminality, like each key on her piano. Expect dizzying side effects—humiliation, shame—when she takes on the filmed head’s subject-object ambiguity. 10 As when after the earthquake, you need transport vehicles to get things to the damaged island, not disappearing solaces. Like the repentant boy, she apologizes to her things, acknowledging in them excess metaphysical presence, cultural fantasy: fetish, value, totem. Probable causes, happenstance bind music box interiority into her solid state appurtenances, “I beg your pardon” motivating aura, wish in the real or fake coccinellid, skill in joining. 2. Lately, I’ve been “caught up in things.” He was fighting his decline, but does not remember he put 39 photo albums together for his children. Here’s a photograph of an evicted woman on a sidewalk with all her household things. Think of eye-catching, literally, your eye being tossed around by your things. On her piano is a gold statue of an elongated woman playing a violin. The heavy-metaled woman would make a good defensive weapon, if someone broke in. Likewise, stolid gadgets holding down the virtual realm stir up residual grace, soul, atemporal utopia. Over what’s inside the thing, her nominal adulty-hood superimposes digital war games, plants zapping zombies with seed missiles. Appalling visitors to the substructure seek out vital innards with more than just idle curiosity, child picking apart a beetle. 11 She used to picture soul as a leaky pail, sometimes a thimble. If so, what to do with continuous grace drippings. Wistful gradients on the emission, absorption spectrum require formal generosity in assessing another one’s cherished objects, frog collection, glugging fish pitcher. Time to set limits for sorting out statistical illusions underlying the constant clutter. How about if she pleases herself with a clown face instead? Draw it on her nose, brows, cheeks, lips, forehead, implementing virtuous space, history of her object-sense, then open wide, molecular letters in ragged greens, blues, yellows! The nursing home staff calls the wwii veteran’s assisted bathroom visits “toileting.” Seek forgone...