On Liking Things (crucibles, for example)

These are some of the crucibles I used during our work with aluminum. They are cans, tomato cans, I believe. One of them is wrapped in ceramic fibre. 

I went to throw them out the other day because I'll need new crucibles for bronze and these won't work, but to my surprise, I found it was hard to do. So strange. As I picked them up, I thought they looked rather beautiful in their grey-black way, and I felt a kind of affection for them. My trusty crucibles! They held up, they did the job, they were reliable, convenient, good companions doing their part...

Companions? 

There I was, feeling a kind of affection for a few, charred tin cans. 

And I thought, "What a strange thing - to feel affection for things."

Now of course, we feel attached to objects all the time, it's not at all a rare phenomenon. Quite the opposite! We love certain items of clothing, our phones, our bikes, a pair of shoes, a favourite spoon or mug, and so on. And so on. And so on. We get very attached to them.

(I just discovered, while writing this note, that our new kitten used a bunch of my albums as a scratching post and I got mad, for example.)

But if you think about it, really think about it, that's weird. Other species don't do this, as far as we know. Sure, we can see how our pets prefer certain toys we buy for them, and we know bower birds build elaborate and decorated bowers, and maybe octopuses "like" some shells more than others. But none of that approaches the kind of complexity of mechanisms involved in the affection or devotion that we humans demonstrate toward Things.

Part of my attachment to these crucibles was aesthetic. They are rather nice looking (the blanketed one, not so much). Grey-blue-black, a bit of purple, different gradations of dark, a simple and satisfying shape. 


And the other part of the attachment is no doubt memory: recalling what I was able to do with them, how they glowed bright red as we approached 800ยบ, the excitement of pouring molten metal out of them, the failures they were involved in and how those were overcome. 

It's all perfectly reasonable then, to care about these objects. Perfectly reasonable for those memories to find their home in these objects, to become embedded there, and for the value and emotional appeal of those memories to be transferred to the objects themselves. All very reasonable. Yes, yes.

But it's still mysterious. There's a lot going on in that act of liking Things, and to see through that act for a moment was a delight.

I'm not sure that I've managed to transmit this "peering behind the veil of our mechanisms" so well with this scribbling, but I'll leave this note here.

Comments

  1. csefFebruary 15, 2022

    Ahh, what a great writing! Again :)) How many things we can find to observe and reflect on related to the fire workshop if we are attentive.

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    Replies
    1. robertoFebruary 15, 2022

      Thank you, Csef! "If we are attentive", yes, indeed.

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  2. glvFebruary 25, 2022

    Nice post, hermano. Thoughtful and immediate, personal. I think about attachment a lot -- well, I wonder about attachment and l'iking,'; I'm not sure it's actually THINKING -- especially in relationship to place. There is something mysterious about it but it has a lot to do with the way memory works and wtih practice. Memory (both individual and social or cultural) secretes itself or concretizes itself in matierials, in things. These things (objects, sites) are sort of like an external storage but probably more active than that image suggests. They act as triggers or prompts, calling up memory and accumulating new ones as we 'work' with the thing. And they focus our recollection. That's what I mean by practice. We use something, we walk a certain path, we work a particular field or visit a particular site, and we inahbit it deeply, we extend a part of ourself (what part??!) into that site or object at the same time that it 'works' on us. It's a dynamic relationship. Those cans worked on you as you worked with them. The cans aren't inert, fixed or stable things; they are a kind of process!

    There's a lot of interesting work on affect and more-than-human (and non-representational) geography that considers these questions. Nigel Thrift, for example. Also Timothy Morton (theory of objects). And plenty of others I can't think of right now. They offer some sophisticated ways of thinking about this marvelous phenomenon, which oftens includes, as you point out, an aesthetic dimension.

    Thanks for the reminder to pay attention -- at all levels.

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  3. robertoFebruary 28, 2022

    Thanks for all this! I'll look into Thrift and Morton, out of curiosity. But if it's too academic I'm not sure how far I'll get. Too many things to read, etc. In any case, for sure, none of this is 'passive' - the cans aren't inert, landscapes aren't inert or fixed. (Silo writes about this kind of thing in 'Humanize the Earth', for example: "External landscape is what we perceive of things, while internal landscape is what we sift from them through the sieve of our internal world. These landscapes are one and constitute our indissoluble vision of reality.") Here I was mostly surprised by having caught that 'mechanism' of affection and memory in action, and realized how particular to human beings it seems to be, as far as I can tell. Lots going on there, delightful to catch a glimpse at one's workings...

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