Sit on a chair,
Relax your muscles, and take a few deep breaths.
Now pay attention to your sitting posture.
Where are your legs? Where are the chair’s legs?
Where is your posterior? Where on the chair are you sitting?
Pay attention to your breathing. Does the chair support or restrict it? What relationship is formed between the movement of your lungs, and the back of the chair?
And now be the chair.
When we sit on a chair, we become like it. Was the chair created in our image? Or were we created in its image? And what about everything around it – the table, dishes, computer, walls, windows? What is their shape? And why is it their shape?
I like to think about the relationship we maintain with our objects through acts of identification, and desperate efforts to be them. What happens when we try to turn the body into still life?
The living body is exposed.
This is a non-scripted act of using the body as material, and when the body is required to become inanimate: when it makes an effort to be still, and assumes a non-organic shape, that is when its trembling is exposed. This trembling is a form of resisting death, the inanimate state of the piece of furniture.
In Days of Homecoming by Sara Shilo, a purse hanger describes itself:
“Who am I if not a metal hand impaled into the wall, launching twisted fingers into the air, and all that is accorded to it is the dubious satisfaction of preventing a fall; resisting the force of gravity; […] Look at humans: so proud of their inventions, and not one among them will assume responsibility for the brilliant heartless idea that led to my creation! They went and plucked the fingers of a living, breathing hand, separated from the rounded base that knows how to gather and form a fist, and send it far away on exhilarating missions, and saw that it was good”. (Days of Homecoming, p. 65, Hebrew)
In a dialogue between live and still objects, our weakness is visible– the muscles tire and tremble, the lines twist and bend, and no matter how many books I try to hold and display in my arms, I will never be able to compete with a bookcase and its success in sorting and holding the books, resisting the force of gravity. There is a difference between us and inanimate objects in existence in time and space – between the permanent and the impermanent – from which stem the advantages and disadvantages of each one. The hanger resists the force of gravity with greater determination than us, and, in exchange, relinquishes its ability to change: to punch, to draw away from, and closer to, the body to which it is attached.
In The Bridge, a short story by Franz Kafka, the bridge is described in human characteristics – it has limbs, hair, ears, and a coat – and it behaves like a body, lying and stretching over a ravine. It is waiting for the first human to walk over it, to validate it as a bridge. At the moment of the encounter, it is tempted to look at the human, to deviate from its inanimate function, and thus ceases to exist as a bridge, and both of them fall to their deaths.
“He came, he tapped me with the iron point of his stick, then he lifted my coattails with it and put them in order upon me. He plunged the point of his stick into my bushy hair and let it lie there for a long time, forgetting me no doubt while he wildly gazed around him. But then – I was just following him in thought over mountain and valley – he jumped with both feet on the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, not knowing what was happening. Who was it? A child? A dream? A wayfarer? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned around so as to see him. A bridge to turn around! I had not yet turned quite around when I already began to fall, I fell and in a moment I was torn and transpierced by the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the rushing water”. (The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, published by Schocken Books)
In the film, The Beauty and the Beast, Belle is entertained by household objects. They serve the master of the house, the Beast, who longs for Belle’s love, and hopes she can see beyond the savage beast that he is. The story revolves around the question: What is human? Is this savage beast more human than human beings whose behavior is ugly? The presence of the objects living in the house accentuates the question. The inanimate house comes to life, creating an uncanny atmosphere waiting for order to come and clarify what is human and what is not.
We are intimidated by the possibility of blending totally with what is inanimate. We are alive, therefore, as far as we are concerned, we are not inanimate. But the truth is that we and our objects exist collaboratively. That is not such a clear distinction.
Our objects are another way, besides photographs, robots, and cyborgs, to think about our limited and deteriorating body, which is not all-powerful, and is ultimately destined to die, not to survive over time. A cyborg is a man-machine, and maintains a close relationship with his instruments until they become a single entity. Robots and photographs are entire, separate entities that exist independently from the deteriorating body. In exchange for a longer life, they pay the price of being unable to change. By contrast, objects expand certain abilities, and act collaboratively with the body: there is reciprocity here.
Objects are not a sign of existence like a photograph, nor a simulation of the body like a robot.
Human-object relationships are perhaps an ancient version of the cyborg: an analog cyborg. With our objects we can do a bit more. They expand our physical abilities, and in exchange we develop an intimate physical relationship with them. We ascribe emotional values to them, collect and hoard them, cherish them. This was aptly articulated by Fritz Seelig as he gathered his life and belongings and relocated them from Germany to Palestine:
“Our everyday life is given order and shape by objects, The objects gain in substance and duration within the decomposition [Verfall] of time, which is delimited by the primordial biology of our existence. But the objects do not thank us for our service to them. We give them duration, but in the process we seem to lose substance. The objects become estranged to us and ridicule our efforts, even while the passage of our life takes its course. They are but ornaments of our inevitable evanescence. Illa oportet crescere me autem minui [they are bound to grow while I diminish] – that’s why we fondle the objects of our everyday life and keep them with us, even if they become obsolete and useless. No price can be high enough to make them the companions of our passage on earth” (What’s in a “Jew-Lift”? The Memoirs of Fritz Seelig of his Passage to Palestine by J. N. Trezib & I. Sonder, p. 38. Translation into English by Daria Kassovsky).
I like this passage because it so potently distills this gap between us and the inanimate objects in our life, and the fundamental reason we ascribe so much meaning to them, despite our somewhat detached, seemingly one-sided relationship.
The house where I grew up in Kfar Vradim was built rather sloppily, professionally speaking. The architect approved the plans with windows on the wrong levels, and aesthetically it was an indefinable polygon with white splatter walls (well, it was fashionable in the 1980s). The surveyor who planned the excavation made a mistake in calculations, as a result of which too much earth was excavated, and the house was built far below street level. All these mistakes led to the birth of an unplanned space in the bottom level of the house, which remained untreated with plaster or flooring, certainly no windows, just a small entrance door. I came to call it the house’s “unconscious”. We installed the heating pipes there. When we had an infestation of mice or cockroaches, this was the epicenter. When we played hide-and-seek, it was the ultimate hiding place – a place where you could vanish and not be found. An untended space in the very soul of the house.
When I was seventeen, my parents divorced. Two and a half years later, we all left the house. In those two and a half years, we met the plumber more and more frequently, with dampness appearing every few weeks in another part of the house. Everything that had been shoved into the plumbing in the unconscious space of the house rose up and erupted from the walls. The house wept over us, over parting from us.