In the end I care about people because they live in my head (which is why altruism is selfish), but objects live in my head in the same way, so I don't feel silly getting emotionally attached or treating them with respect. It's not animism. And the connectedness just means everything and everyone bleeds into everyone and everything else. And when you start unpacking all that as you do it just turns into one of those 90s videos of Mandelbrot fractal zooms. It's better now I'm old because the detail goes on and the more detail there is the more room there is for more detail (at least for now).
Sometimes I wonder about the background of objects that have been found rather than bought. Who lost them, are they missed, where were they before, where have they been. Could they find their way back? My father found a watch washed up on a remote beach many years ago, it now lives with me, but I have wondered from time to time. Might try to write it myself one day as an imagining! Thanks Michael for a thought provoking read as always
One of my favorite tv series was Connections with James Burke where he would start with, for instance, a ballpoint pen and go on a meander through history and technology and society to show all of the influences that led to its development. It was just the sort of exercise you just did, and I was always fascinated.
I often find myself doing similar connection games- in an ecology, what happens if you change this or remove that? If there is a worlwide shortage of some basic material, how will it alter production and impact daily life? If we could rid ourselves of this particular politician, would things improve or would some equally unctuous and detestable obstruction take his place, like a clog in a sewer? (Sorry, haven't had my coffee yet.)
It can be all too easy to lose sight of the interconnections as we bimble along in our daily lives.
Every mug I own has a backstory…not necessarily as interesting, but full of personal connections. My house is full of objects with connections and backstories, which makes for a bit of a hoarding problem; I have trouble parting with things that have been given to me or have any sentimental value.
I choose the connection game over scrolling when out in public waiting! And I feel like an oddball for it—not that I care. Occasionally, someone looks up from their phone and notices I'm not looking down at mine. They seem a little uncomfortable by that.
My 7th-grade son went to school wearing his older brother's clothes one day. When I noticed after he came from school, I was like, "Didn't someone say something?" He's like, "Do you think anyone notices how anyone looks these days? I think they're too attached to their phones and devices."
Conversely, young people seem less attached to physical objects. My daughter moved out this year, but almost all of her stuff is still here, and I have a feeling it will be for a long time. Each object is a story, but also a decision on whether to keep it. Telling stories sounds like more fun than deciding what to do with stuff. Thanks for sharing this story!
I thought I was going to struggle with this and had to Google a few of the names, but I think I've understood it!
I am, by nature, a hoarder. Before I met my wife I was something of an itinerant, sometimes because of boardom, sometimes addiction related. Consequently I've had very little in the way of possessions for most of my adult life. Now I can't throw anything away because in one way or another there is a story attatched. I've had to build two sheds next to the caravan to actually store our stuff and even the materials for them have their own tales attatched.
I'll have to have a little look at Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Wilson and Butler! My ignorance abounds here I'm afraid.
My wife has just called me a twat for refusing to take the bin out...
A wonderful read. These connections of instances, people and objects that enter our lives can take us through amazing memories. It’s more for us ‘older’ ones to weave through them as it seems the young ones tend to roll their eyes until they get a few more years of experience and depth into their lives.
Fabulous. Many years ago, I played the slow short-form version of the connection game in my own blog piece entitled "The Universe Inside a Can of Beans". I'll spare you the bulk of it and paste the concluding paragraphs...
"There’s an entire bloody universe in that can of beans if you look deeply enough. If you truly consider each thing that you encounter and how it has come to be in your presence (or all the things that have led to YOU having come to be in ITS presence at that point in time) then you will just be mind-blown in awe at how amazingly connected and interdependent everything in the universe is. Something as simple as a can of beans has come to be only because of a huge web of historically and culturally connected individual events, and because your brain likes to think linearly you cannot possibly follow all those strands of web back to their origins and extrapolate their future destinations at the same time without it imploding. Your brain simply can’t do that and still allow you to function on a social level. But that doesn’t change the fact that all those strands in the web are there. It all happened somewhere on the perimeters of your conscious perception of the present moment.
"So what do we, as humans do? We think: “Right, can of beans. How boring. What can I do with them to create something better/different?" We just take for granted how it came to be, in order to think about what it could potentially be, thus extending the web ever outwards. We simplify and big picture the entire historical process in order to take it to the next level: to grow, to evolve. Which is great, but by doing that we completely forget to appreciate what already is and has been.
"What is the lesson to take from all this? That there’s practically an entire universe inside EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL THING OR PERSON?" That as we grow ever outwards into greater and greater complexity as individuals and as a society and as a civilization and as a species we lose appreciation of where we came from, feel a disconnection from source, and that leads to greater boredom, less spiritual awareness, but to ever greater creativity?"
Of course, William Blake said it far more pithily than either of us in Auguries of Innocence...
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
I get the feeling that he, too, was very rarely bored :)
I loved this piece so very much. It was, as most of your work is, thought provoking. And, so I share my typewriter story. I hope you and your readers indulge me: I was the first person in my large family to attend college. My mother and I spent hours pasting S&H Green Stamps into books to redeem for an electric typewriter I could bring to college. The nearest redemption center was 45 minutes away from our town in VT: Keene, NH. This is also the town in which I studied w/a private flute teacher at Keene State during HS in preparation for attending music school at Hartt College of Music (so named at the time). My father let me take the car and, as I pulled into the redemption center parking lot, I heard on the radio the news that Elvis died. So many threads were linked to that typewriter. Fast forward to my wedding day in 1988, on which I married a man (6 yrs my senior) in CT whose first job as an underwriter, before changing careers to education and meeting me across the hall at the school in which we both taught, was in Keene, NH. In his spare time, he used to play tennis on the courts at Keene State, right next to the building in which I took private lessons at in HS. As I waited for my parents to pick me up after my lessons, I often sat on the steps and watched the tennis players. Had one of them been my future husband Tony? Plus, Tony also worked part-time in the evenings at the very discount department store that my parents shopped at while I had my lessons. As for that typewriter, it moved with me from college, through many apartments and - ultimately - to the house my husband and I built in 1992. It was only a few years ago that I parted with it. I remember it - and all the connections (Keene, Green Stamps, college, music, my husband and even Elvis) - fondly.
"doom-scrolling" - such a good phrase, and thought-filling article. And yes, I love the interconnectedness of things... I'm going to have to write stories about some of the more odd unusual or unusually boring things I have around the house - stories that my kids likely don't remember me telling them now that they're in their 50s.
Lovely piece, so much genuine emotion & detail, thank you for sharing.
I’m forwarding this to my son, who is studying anthropology, I think he’ll like its significance about the importance of kept objects, time and place.
In the end I care about people because they live in my head (which is why altruism is selfish), but objects live in my head in the same way, so I don't feel silly getting emotionally attached or treating them with respect. It's not animism. And the connectedness just means everything and everyone bleeds into everyone and everything else. And when you start unpacking all that as you do it just turns into one of those 90s videos of Mandelbrot fractal zooms. It's better now I'm old because the detail goes on and the more detail there is the more room there is for more detail (at least for now).
Sometimes I wonder about the background of objects that have been found rather than bought. Who lost them, are they missed, where were they before, where have they been. Could they find their way back? My father found a watch washed up on a remote beach many years ago, it now lives with me, but I have wondered from time to time. Might try to write it myself one day as an imagining! Thanks Michael for a thought provoking read as always
One of my favorite tv series was Connections with James Burke where he would start with, for instance, a ballpoint pen and go on a meander through history and technology and society to show all of the influences that led to its development. It was just the sort of exercise you just did, and I was always fascinated.
I often find myself doing similar connection games- in an ecology, what happens if you change this or remove that? If there is a worlwide shortage of some basic material, how will it alter production and impact daily life? If we could rid ourselves of this particular politician, would things improve or would some equally unctuous and detestable obstruction take his place, like a clog in a sewer? (Sorry, haven't had my coffee yet.)
It can be all too easy to lose sight of the interconnections as we bimble along in our daily lives.
I love this.
Every mug I own has a backstory…not necessarily as interesting, but full of personal connections. My house is full of objects with connections and backstories, which makes for a bit of a hoarding problem; I have trouble parting with things that have been given to me or have any sentimental value.
I choose the connection game over scrolling when out in public waiting! And I feel like an oddball for it—not that I care. Occasionally, someone looks up from their phone and notices I'm not looking down at mine. They seem a little uncomfortable by that.
My 7th-grade son went to school wearing his older brother's clothes one day. When I noticed after he came from school, I was like, "Didn't someone say something?" He's like, "Do you think anyone notices how anyone looks these days? I think they're too attached to their phones and devices."
Conversely, young people seem less attached to physical objects. My daughter moved out this year, but almost all of her stuff is still here, and I have a feeling it will be for a long time. Each object is a story, but also a decision on whether to keep it. Telling stories sounds like more fun than deciding what to do with stuff. Thanks for sharing this story!
I thought I was going to struggle with this and had to Google a few of the names, but I think I've understood it!
I am, by nature, a hoarder. Before I met my wife I was something of an itinerant, sometimes because of boardom, sometimes addiction related. Consequently I've had very little in the way of possessions for most of my adult life. Now I can't throw anything away because in one way or another there is a story attatched. I've had to build two sheds next to the caravan to actually store our stuff and even the materials for them have their own tales attatched.
I'll have to have a little look at Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Wilson and Butler! My ignorance abounds here I'm afraid.
My wife has just called me a twat for refusing to take the bin out...
A wonderful read. These connections of instances, people and objects that enter our lives can take us through amazing memories. It’s more for us ‘older’ ones to weave through them as it seems the young ones tend to roll their eyes until they get a few more years of experience and depth into their lives.
Fabulous. Many years ago, I played the slow short-form version of the connection game in my own blog piece entitled "The Universe Inside a Can of Beans". I'll spare you the bulk of it and paste the concluding paragraphs...
"There’s an entire bloody universe in that can of beans if you look deeply enough. If you truly consider each thing that you encounter and how it has come to be in your presence (or all the things that have led to YOU having come to be in ITS presence at that point in time) then you will just be mind-blown in awe at how amazingly connected and interdependent everything in the universe is. Something as simple as a can of beans has come to be only because of a huge web of historically and culturally connected individual events, and because your brain likes to think linearly you cannot possibly follow all those strands of web back to their origins and extrapolate their future destinations at the same time without it imploding. Your brain simply can’t do that and still allow you to function on a social level. But that doesn’t change the fact that all those strands in the web are there. It all happened somewhere on the perimeters of your conscious perception of the present moment.
"So what do we, as humans do? We think: “Right, can of beans. How boring. What can I do with them to create something better/different?" We just take for granted how it came to be, in order to think about what it could potentially be, thus extending the web ever outwards. We simplify and big picture the entire historical process in order to take it to the next level: to grow, to evolve. Which is great, but by doing that we completely forget to appreciate what already is and has been.
"What is the lesson to take from all this? That there’s practically an entire universe inside EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL THING OR PERSON?" That as we grow ever outwards into greater and greater complexity as individuals and as a society and as a civilization and as a species we lose appreciation of where we came from, feel a disconnection from source, and that leads to greater boredom, less spiritual awareness, but to ever greater creativity?"
Of course, William Blake said it far more pithily than either of us in Auguries of Innocence...
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
I get the feeling that he, too, was very rarely bored :)
Thought-provoking piece, nicely done.
And... Colin Wilson and Brian Aldiss -- sounds like great company. I'm envious.
I loved this piece so very much. It was, as most of your work is, thought provoking. And, so I share my typewriter story. I hope you and your readers indulge me: I was the first person in my large family to attend college. My mother and I spent hours pasting S&H Green Stamps into books to redeem for an electric typewriter I could bring to college. The nearest redemption center was 45 minutes away from our town in VT: Keene, NH. This is also the town in which I studied w/a private flute teacher at Keene State during HS in preparation for attending music school at Hartt College of Music (so named at the time). My father let me take the car and, as I pulled into the redemption center parking lot, I heard on the radio the news that Elvis died. So many threads were linked to that typewriter. Fast forward to my wedding day in 1988, on which I married a man (6 yrs my senior) in CT whose first job as an underwriter, before changing careers to education and meeting me across the hall at the school in which we both taught, was in Keene, NH. In his spare time, he used to play tennis on the courts at Keene State, right next to the building in which I took private lessons at in HS. As I waited for my parents to pick me up after my lessons, I often sat on the steps and watched the tennis players. Had one of them been my future husband Tony? Plus, Tony also worked part-time in the evenings at the very discount department store that my parents shopped at while I had my lessons. As for that typewriter, it moved with me from college, through many apartments and - ultimately - to the house my husband and I built in 1992. It was only a few years ago that I parted with it. I remember it - and all the connections (Keene, Green Stamps, college, music, my husband and even Elvis) - fondly.
"doom-scrolling" - such a good phrase, and thought-filling article. And yes, I love the interconnectedness of things... I'm going to have to write stories about some of the more odd unusual or unusually boring things I have around the house - stories that my kids likely don't remember me telling them now that they're in their 50s.