I was recently thinking about a moment when I was standing in a junk store at Ocracoke island face-to-face with a three string guitar-like contraption. And man, I wanted it. I was bratty in the way only an 11 year old can be until finally my mom assured me that I in fact would not be going home with this device, but I could play her guitar when we returned from vacation. I barely was aware that she had a guitar most of the time, but occasionally she would finger pick a few songs and sing quite wonderfully, something she almost always refuses to do.
When I got back home from Ocracoke, I started to play guitar and haven't stopped since - basically 3-4 hours a day from the time I picked it up until I stopped being a classical guitar major at App - something I have never regretted - I was meant to play with ideas for a living and play popular music for enjoyment.
What is interesting to me when I recollect this experience is how much I wasn't in charge - all of the power was in the object - in that ridiculous contraption in the junk store. I did not choose the guitar - it chose me. And I don't mean that in any kind of lofty way. Our days are constantly caught up with objects, pushing us, pulling us, making us comfortable and awkward. Yet when we think about the world, we usually think that it somehow completely exists in our head - inside of the subject.
To make a reductive point about the power of the material world: I like to smoke, but I like to be comfortable. If you force me to smoke outside in the cold, I tend to smoke less. The objective criteria had a far greater impact than the arguments appealing to my subjective reasoning, e.g., smoking will kill you in really nasty, painful ways.
This is nice — "the object chooses us." Of course, as you and I have discussed, this attraction takes place in between you and the guitar: you pull and push each other. If we step back for a moment, it becomes obvious that life is all attraction, repulsion, and apathy between and amongst bodies of all sorts, animate and inanimate.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely - that "between space" that is so hard to talk about and so hard to really think without. It's a concept that works because it's grounded - most concepts, as you know, are not grounded and hence become weird abstractions that have little to do with anything. I've been particularly thinking about all the political concepts that I've used over the last couple years that fall into the latter category.
ReplyDeleteI also love the way that you can invoke scientific metaphors (concepts) - like metabolism or attraction in a magnetic sense - in philosophy and the concepts not only work, but they come alive in a way they never did, at least for me, when I was taking all the science classes I had to take in college and High School.