OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS | COMMON PLACE NO. 20 | SPRING 2020
Childhood animism endows objects with feelings and places them within emotional life. These attachments spill out into the world as subjective objects that we imagine to be coherent, a whole, not merely disparate parts. That we see others as simultaneously whole and in fragments is consistent with this, even if often lamentable in practice. What interests me here are objects, mostly, laden with subjectivity—and sometimes, of course, the reverse.
I was 18 when I bought this watch from my uncle Leif, as I called him, my cousin Ingrid’s husband, a watch dealer in Bergen. At 16, I bought another Omega from him, which I still have. At 12, I replaced my Timex with a cheaper Swiss one, suitable for a kid. I no longer have it. Preferring the one I bought at 16, I gave this one to my father. When he died, I got it back. It has a self-winding mechanism and I had to repair it. It’s now the watch I mainly wear, since otherwise it winds down and the date is cumbersome to reset. It reminds me of my father, but I chose it. Watches are functional objects, but they say something about the men who wear them. What they say varies with the watch. An Omega is a middling brand, less prestigious than others, but with some claim to cachet. It was associated with American astronauts at one point. This one and the other I own put function over stature, but not entirely. The stature they convey is that such watches can and will be handed down, not because they’re baubles but because they were designed and built to endure. Periodically, someone trained to do so takes them apart, does necessary cleaning and repairs, reseals their crystals, and they tick on accurately for another cycle, independent of the digital Atomic Clock or whatever it is that sets the time on my mobile phone or your iWatch. I set mine to it, and in a day or two they’ve wandered. I can predict the wandering, which is part of their subjectivity. I am relatively punctual, but the women in my life are not. One or two are famously not, an Irish time detached from Greenwich. Punctuality is overrated. I do it only because I don’t like to keep women waiting. I don’t mind waiting myself. Women’s time is the moon and the tides. They take their sweet time, and it’s best to take your watch off. Prophylactics came to mind when I thought about writing this. They’re peculiar objects, packaged, even more so in use. It took me ages to get used to them, galoshes compared to bare feet but an impediment to nature’s effects. They even figure in a poem, owing to their episodic failure—I owe a son to this, but not everyone is so lucky. I think we cleave to the brand we first encounter, like our loyalty to a cigarette or cola, imagining it’s better, although what we mean by this evolves steadily as fears of different sorts outweigh potential pleasures. By then, too, we’ve learned to discount all claims to be anything but kitchen gloves. Keep us from hot water, we think, buying another dozen. They figure in another poem that satirizes my habit of keeping one in my wallet, which bore its mark. It can’t have been good for it to sit there unused for months on end. This era of border scrutiny would seem to rule it out, but that was then—we traveled everywhere unmolested, although I was occasionally scrutinized following terror (once coming at the German border, coming from Utrecht, and once at Heathrow, coming from Milan). In my entire life, I was accosted exactly twice by prostitutes, in Santa Monica and Shanghai. No, I said, but thanks for asking. The women in Santa Monica laughed; the one in Shanghai drifted away. Her pitch was subtler, dressed as she was like other office workers. Nor did I pick up anyone. Less vanity, then, than an object in my imaginary life.
A house like ours is a container of intimately familiar settings. Viewed from the street, it sits squarely, an articulated cube with a roof and an offset, indented entrance. Built in 1902, it updated what was then a Victorian pattern, clothing it in the Shingle Style then in vogue—a paring down in keeping with Charles Keeler’s Marie Kondo-like ethos, then prevailing despite Bernard Maybeck’s penchant for ornament. John Galen Howard’s house up the hill on LeRoy is closer to it in sensibility, although much grander. This is a modest house, but the plan is formal—an entry foyer, with the main rooms to the left, separated by a pocket door. Upstairs, four small bedrooms and a bath. The plan is unaltered, but a previous owner pushed out the back of the kitchen, added a deck, and enlarged the half-bath. We remodeled the kitchen and that half-bath, and later opened the upstairs bathroom up, removing the enclosure hiding a chimney and iron pipe. When we bought the house, we added proper heating. Every time we work on it, we’ve added insulation, including a new window wall along the kitchen’s west wall. A house is possibly the ultimate subjective object. Reading a biography of Walter Benjamin, it’s striking how he sets up each of his numerous dwellings to honor and replicate the bourgeois setting of his childhood. The rooms reflect their tastes and pasts of their two principal occupants, with the downstairs tipping toward the classical and the upstairs divided between two aesthetics. Throughout, there’s a mix, the mutual influence that results from 45 years of marriage but was especially sparked by a renaissance of domesticity when the children departed, added to by the spike in disposable income that followed their leaving university. When they’re present, the house seems to be constantly in motion, barely recovering from the daily onslaught. Life is momentary, bent to whatever pulls at it. Later on, the supposedly empty nest proves to be ideally sized for its remaining two residents. In an act of genius and compassion, one of us renovated a shed in the backyard as a library and studio for the other. It was partly to get the books out of the house, perhaps the writer along with them, but it was a haven that the children dubbed “the Fortress of Solitude,” after the Man of Steel. In the current scheme of things, an upstairs room has become “the Winter Palace,” with the barn, as it’s known, as a retreat, ideal in the garden’s high season. Like the house, the barn is a square cube with a shed roof, French doors and a proper doorway replacing the barnlike slider it used to have. It has a proper door and a narrow, booklined hallway, and a main room that’s 16 x 16 feet. Shelves on two sides hold a lot of books, although the shelves would benefit from additional strengthening. The house and barn site downhill from the Hayward Fault, an active seismic thing that last gave way in the 1860s and is overdue for another jolt. We get them—previews of the expected bigger one. The last sharp jolt led us to rebuild the foundation. We haven’t anchored the bookcases, one of the tasks on our list. Every morning, I thank God we made it through another day without this disruption, the consequences of which are hard to gauge. Along with the fault, we have the perennial threat of fires—a 1923 fire burned down most of the houses uphill to the east. And as I write this, we have the coronavirus, precautions for which the house’s two residents are taking. In 1905, a previous resident died in the house, I read online (researching the house’s history). I hope to die in it, too, but not immediately, God willing. It was built by Charmian Kittredge, who married Jack London. She also built the house to its south in 1904. Her father was a person of importance locally, with a street in Berkeley named after him. It was “a spec house,” a carpenter we hired told me after we bought it, pointing to its shoddy construction. We’ve beefed it up and also laid down an attic floor to create a diaphragm, along with insulation, so the house no longer shakes when our adult sons descend the stairs, as it did when they were adolescents. The newspapers we take include advertisements for houses in other regions. When our third son moved to Richmond, Virginia, we looked briefly at houses there—one or two were definitely tempting. But if this house were a two-story flat in Manhattan, for example, it would be prized for its formality and relative spaciousness. And it has a deep garden with a summer house. All the conveniences, as they say. Thanks to our oldest son, we finally learned how to host 20 people for holiday or birthday dinners, clearing out the living room and arranging tables diagonally. The second time we did this, we decided to exchange one room for the other, moving the living room to the west—a smaller room, warmer in the winter—and moving a trestle table from the kitchen as the centerpiece of the larger front room. The former dining room table, shorter and wider, fits perfectly in the kitchen. It only took us 35 years to figure this out. Naturally, we find that—like our neighbors to the north—we dine with friends in the kitchen. People think of houses as investments, but what you actually invest is that part of you that adheres to it. There are a few other houses I can think of to which I adhered, even if they’ve slipped out of view. This one will, too, but with any luck at all, that slipping will be all of a piece, leaving it to others to decide how much it adhered to them.
My car was built by BMW in May 1981. A 320i, a 1980 model, I have kept it running at some expense because: I don’t drive that much; the car is one of the last that’s screwed together and thus is repairable; it has proper bumpers and a lack of the current accoutrements; I like its looks; and it’s wonderful to drive on winding roads. Once, driving from Olema toward Stinson Beach, I entered the wood-enclosed roadway headed south with an SUV right behind me, its driver glaring impatiently. Quite soon, I was ahead of him—far ahead, as my venerable car was built for roads like that. It’s not especially fast—the freeway in fifth gear takes the tachometer to 3,500 and up—but its handling on winding roads is like an aging handball player, making up for deficits with a surfeit of cunning. The car has “had more work than Joan Rivers,” I joke, and the dashboard is held together with black duct tape, a purchased suede-like thing covering the dashboard top, a landscape of deep fissures. I had the seats repaired. When I take it in to get it tuned and through smog, the mechanic fixes the odd small things. I await the State of California banning internal combustion engines. I sense the steady dwindling of gas stations, although given the amount I drive it, I fill it about once a month (at most). I’ve thought about putting in an electric motor, despite the cost ($70k, I read) and the availability of options, like the electric Mini-Cooper. I don’t know. It’s too new to qualify as a classic, although to me it qualifies—the high point of the models that extrapolated from the 2002. My wife bought the car originally, used, from a mechanic she knew. A brother-in-law told me he once drove with her across the Bay Bridge and she never shifted out of second. Somehow it survived this and I took it over. The mechanic is a specialist, and I used a father-and-son operation to address the extensive rust. It needs to go back to them fairly soon for a touchup and a new paint job, this time by a local body shop that uses the factory paint. But it can go another year, I think, before I do this. Last year, I put new tires on it, and replaced the shock absorbers. My wife commented when we drove out to the coast that it was running smoothly. A couple grand will do that. Some months ago, I gave a friend a ride to the train station and she commented that “You still have this car.” Like the house and barn, it’s an object that adhered, that merits my affection and the cost of its upkeep. I hesitate to call works of art objects, but of course they are, even as they serve as portals for the imagination. I started buying paintings in early 1990s. There were others artworks “in the family,” including a lithograph of St. Stephen’s in Vienna that I found on the sidewalk. We bought posters in Paris and, for $1.00, I bought a poster from the Soviet Union, circa 1923, from a gallery in San Francisco that was closing. “That’s a good one,” the owner said ruefully. We had these older works reframed when the living room, now the dining room, was repainted a few years ago. My own collection is in what’s now the living room and in two upstairs rooms. In almost every case, I know the artist personally and bought the work in question from their gallery shows or from them directly. In one memorable incident, I bought a painting on exhibit in Soho in NYC, posted the fact on Facebook, and heard from the artist, then living in Manhattan, asking if I wanted to have dinner. At that dinner, I bought a second painting. Some years later, the artist wrote me that a major collector bought all the other paintings in that particular show. There must be something about these personal ties that creates the affinity. I bought one artwork at a gallery without knowing the artist and it didn’t take. I liked the painting, but I ended up giving it away. When I buy art, I make the decision to do so quickly. Recently, I bought the largest painting I own. I bought a much smaller one, but was haunted by the larger. I felt it was a masterpiece, despite being unsure where I’d hang it. Most of what I buy is scaled to the house. I delayed bringing it home, but finally did so. I was going to put it upstairs, but my wife liked it. In a household, art is subject to negotiation. My collection has slowly infiltrated the downstairs, piece by piece. The barn has only one real work of art, a calligraphic piece by a close friend that she made for me. It’s on a wall, held there with drafting tape. Calligraphy is the one kind of work that can resist the daylight that fills the barn. The work riffs on writing itself, tracing the same thought across successive kinds of Chinese calligraphic script. When my friend returned from China, she brought me a fragment of a poem set out by her calligraphy teacher. When I wake up, I see it. It’s set sideways against a wall, being too big to hang, but in bed, I can read it sideways. That poem figures in one I wrote. They relate in the way my mind connects the people and settings that the calligraphic piece and other objects in that room invoke. I sometimes imagine that the man who died in the house died in this room, that his spirit is mixed with these others, the quick and the dead of my emotional trajectory, landed in this 12.5 x 12.5 foot space and somehow tethered to these artworks, like the tendrils of a vine or hedge.
Technically, the coronavirus is an organism. We see it enlarged, a ball with grasping things protruding from it. It’s as contagion that it’s entered our world and consciousness. As I write this, voluntarily sequestered, I have no idea what will happen. I have friends and relations at risk, and we’re at risk ourselves. The neighborhood and social media are alive with the clamor of anxiety. A friend who lives in Shanghai and posts daily noted recently that what she sees in here and Europe is what she saw there a few weeks ago—the panic, the response, the gradual regaining of ordinary life as the everyday feels less and less perilous. Of course, it may be perilous. We attend to that. My mother went through the Spanish Flu pandemic when she was three. She told me that her entire Iowa town appeared to be prostrate—this was her childhood memory. It’s the reference point for those paid to think about it. At the store yesterday, I bought a disinfectant, wiping down the packages I bought before putting them in the fridge. We do things like this, not knowing what else to do, and hope it will make a difference. My life has been something of a golden age. I’ve had access to treatments unavailable to past generations, but now these organisms are mutating beyond what the treatments and preventives on current offer can handle. It’s interesting that the coronavirus doesn’t seem to affect children, perhaps because they make such ideal carriers. We are in some sense objects and collections of attributes. We relate to animals similarly, especially domestic ones and wildlife we associate with harm or semi-domesticity (squirrels in parks, for example). It’s unsurprising that people relate to us and we to them based on visible cues we provide accidentally, on purpose, and in between. (I think we underestimate seriously the vast gap between accidental and purposeful. This may reflect our purposes’ specificity: when they’re lost on others or misinterpreted by them, ambiguities arise. People act on what they see.) Another way to look at it is the way subject and object merge in close, besotted relationships. A slender neck may involuntarily invoke a memory of another, a chain of association that can devolve into untoward assumptions. Part of the wonder of love is how desire unfolds, hastening the merger. But delusion is endless, as the Buddhists say, especially as a rationale for unwanted advances. Ambiguity plays into this, usually without realizing it. In Coimbra, an ancient university town in Portugal, the students all wear gowns. This gives them a certain standing within civil life that exempts them from the usual typecasting of gender. As members of an academic community, they have in some sense the freedom of the city, the way the Sephardic Jews were exempted from antiSemitic strictures in Italian cities like Parma, free to lead ordinary lives, to pursue trades and professions. To don an academic gown is only to run the risk of such derision as an academic might face—not much in a city anchored by Iberia’s second-oldest university, established with royal patronage, in a palace. They have your back. We live in ambiguous times. Men and women shade into each other, adopting each other’s clothes, jewelry, mannerisms, and, through miracles of chemistry and surgery, their gender. Marriage lifts any limits and medical science blesses these unions with children if they’re wanted. Those whose norms are disrupted by this evolution are discomfited by what they read as visual incongruity. The solution, which is simply to go with it, eludes them. As I write this, I hear the clamor of exceptions—how predators abound, unmoved by gowns. Objects there for the taking is how they look to them. We heard it from Donald Trump before he was elected. We’ve seen some big names among them face a reckoning, but they are legion, as the Bible puts it. The cures on offer are draconian, and it’s clear that most societies tolerate a certain level of predation. Kill some chickens to scare the monkeys is the how it is, even in repressive societies where women are cloistered and cloaked from head to foot. Liberal societies make this the ongoing price of liberation, modulated only where polite society can enforce its rules—a tiny sphere. Our humanity, object and subject, works for and against us. Science fiction speculated about robots with these same attributes, and the ethics of abusing them. Coming soon, I imagine, as humans try to sublimate their tics. We can foresee psychopathic and sociopathic connoisseurs who forego robots for the frisson of abusing the real thing. Instead of the Turing test, we may need another that measures human’s ability to find subjects in animate objects, to possess the requisite empathy to check tendencies to inhumanity that are rife in our species. Swedenborg more or less anticipates this, painting humanity as much more generally bad than good, though priding itself on how good it is. The afterlife, he wrote, sweeps away all dissembling. The test is self-administered, and those who fail find their way to a Hell of Predation. “As on earth, so in heaven,” the Lord’s Prayer says. In Hell, also, it seems.
A chair is a chair is a chair, but it’s not true. Sofas similarly vary. Eclecticism holds that one can mix and match, while partisans for a given style insist on a consistency they regard as authentic. I grew up in a midcentury modern household. My parents’ furniture reflected the largesse afforded by my father’s work and, when I was 12, was added to by a substantial purchase of Scandinavian modern furniture—two chairs and a sofa—at the source. This ensemble lived harmoniously with furniture my father built—the teak recycled from Southeast Asian shipping crates—and various objects of decorative art they inherited or acquired from family and their extensive travels. It was eclectic, despite a larger theme of modernity that was almost unconsciously adopted, my parents being actual moderns. My sister and her daughter have most of this. My tribute to the Scandinavian modern part is an IKEA Prong chair, perhaps the best piece of mass-produced furniture that company sells. Our furniture otherwise combines two refurbished traditional chairs, the kind that would have been at home in my father’s club in Manhattan, with a refurbished sofa that my cousin thinks is from before 1900. After owning several contemporary sofas that felt too large for the space, we gave the last one to our daughter—it fits perfectly in her long living room—and bought this smaller one, simple and elegant. My cousin made down cushions for it that flatten, keeping the overall line of it. Around these places to sit is the rest—two cabinets, a cherrywood coffee table, and various paintings and vases. In the next room is a cherrywood trestle table, long and narrow, with six bentwood armchairs. The kitchen has a different cherrywood table with six bentwood café chairs. Together, they form a whole that’s right for the house. This theme extends to the kitchen, renovated over five months. My wife addressed each part only when it came time to decide. The cabinetmaker helped with the planning and also intuited the exact look my wife wanted. She and the designer developed the plan and colors together. For five months, we cooked in the basement, often disrupted by the work above it, and ate partly out a fridge in the what was then the dining room. The work dragged on, but finally it was done—and remarkably better. Part of the betterment was our discovering an anomaly in the kitchen that gave us 18 inches of added width. The red tiles my wife had hated became an oak floor, more resilient than I imagined. A new window wall looks into the integrated and insulated kitchen annex. The elaborate fan above the old range top had no actual outlet, and what we assumed to be a header where the old kitchen wall was wasn’t. All this was put right. We’ve lived in it for seven years, and it still feels exactly right for us and for the house. To renovate in place is to apply the Slow Movement to dwelling. Like deciding on furniture that you have to repair and refurbish, it moves at its own pace and demands faith in the wisdom of your decisions. You often have to modify what comes back, as with my cousin’s contribution of the down cushions, but you commit yourself to being guided by careful, thoughtful choices and direct experience. That word dwelling was mentioned to me recently by my writing partner Richard Bender. John Habraken, he said, was wary of the word housing, believe that it made a noun of the verb to dwell. Houses and furniture should both be spoke of in a slowly active tense. You do the work, but then you live with them. In time, you have to do the work again, either to repair, renew, or restore what’s there or to question it and revise again. This is dwelling. I never met Habraken, but I spent four months at his institute at the Technical University in Eindhoven. His aim was to make it possible for people to adapt their dwellings to their evolving needs, and for communities and neighborhoods to think of dwellings in the context of a continuous fabric of different scales, each with its own rules and necessities, but all interacting, “nested together” so that one didn’t unnecessarily impinge on another. At one end of this spectrum are the chairs, attributes of the inner world of dwelling. At the other end is the city and region, with all the infrastructure required to support dwellings and the various enterprises that sustain their occupants. They have human usage in common—the ways that humans at different ages walk and sit, gather and interact. We are the measure, as we like to say. Even at the neighborhood scale, this is sometimes forgotten. Cities and regions, caught up in larger issues, can readily overlook the human dimension, the condition, of individual dwellers. These days, not everyone can find a place to dwell. I’m lucky to live the kind of life my parents would recognize, even if the aesthetic differs from their own. Others aren’t as lucky, and solutions for them are elusive. Walking around, I sometimes see sofas and armchairs lined up against an outer wall. This is the desire for dwelling, perhaps with the thought that items of furniture can seed a house, or even a room. This is wishful thinking. It’s also a tragedy and a disgrace in midst of this region’s vast wealth, equivalent to the Netherlands. We don’t lack for money, but we lack ways to apply it equitably. No place to dwell means dispossessed, and those in this bind are visibly among us.
Like the painter Georgette Chen, I owned a Hermes portable typewriter. I no longer have it, and I gave my daughter my Olivetti portable, which she had repaired and now uses sometimes to write drafts. These European portables were well-made and durable, not unlike my German car and my Swiss watches—a comparable aesthetic. I learned to type when I was 13. I took a summer course. I proved to be a naturally fast and accurate typist. My handwriting is small and borders on illegible. Despite my mother’s efforts, I never unlearned the way I hold pens and pencils, a manner that gives me the control to write or draw with tiny strokes, but makes a lot of handwriting painful. (Stendhal complains about his aching hand. I wonder if he had the same issue?) In high school, I readily talked my teachers into letting me type out tests—none of them could read my writing, either. But the sight of typed copy pulled my writing together. I still write sometimes longhand—my diary, notes to self, and notes in meetings. (Many now type notes on their laptops, but I find this distracting. I can prompt my memory with relatively sparse notes, although being the scribe of various committees required something more like verbatim. My predecessor in one case knew shorthand, as my mother did, but I never learned it. I just wrote fast and illegibly, then tried to guess what I’d written. Occasionally, I was completely baffled. The laptop is a typewriter’s analogue, although an iPad with a keyboard comes closest to the feel of a portable with the paper held up by a metal thing that backed it when put in place. The Hermes’ one flaw was that the paper slipped and the rows of text weren’t always even at the bottom of the page. The Olivetti didn’t have this flaw. I shifted to electric typewriters—a Smith-Corona and an Olympus. At work, I had access to an IBM Selectric, with its gorgeous evenness of tone and line. Now all of this is no big deal. Typewriters are objects of nostalgic affection. One advantage of a typewriter was that it held no content. It was purely mechanical. When you showed up at the border, they might look for notebooks or manuscripts, but a portable’s only interest was that forensically it could be tied to you, should you send a ransom note or letters carrying a threat or serving as possible evidence. Today, we leave a digital trail that links us to an array of things, should they decide to move on us. We may as well put our names and addresses everything, save them the bother. Once, reporters went in to type their stories out, or—pressed for time—phoned them in, depending on notes or a hastily typed-out draft, edited by others. Before I went back to graduate school, I worked for a researcher whose Olympus electric typewriter was filled with hair and ashes. I had to clean out sometimes to make it function. Manuals were probably more forgiving. Hair was shorter. “Light fuse and retire quickly,” the instruction read. These were firecrackers my father and I bought in Canada and set off in the “North Woods,” as he called them, the chain of lakes accessed from Ely, Minnesota that extends into Canada. We went canoeing. I can date it by the Berlin Crisis, which unfolded while we were there. SAC jets flew over the woods, headed to Alaska. When the firecrackers went off, they echoed, enhancing the effect. When I was younger, one of my friends tried to make a homemade bomb. He lit the fuse and we waited. Meanwhile, the fuse set fire to a bit of the backyard. His mother came out yelling and helped us put the fire out. We didn’t mention the bomb. It didn’t go out. When my oldest son was five or six, I bought a Roman candle and set it off on the street. It hovered at the height of my head, menacingly, then went down the neighbor’s driveway, spitting sparks. It was unnerving. Except for a few things that spewed sparkles of color, I left the pyrotechnics alone thereafter.
A garden isn’t an object, the landscape architect Linda Jewell made clear to me. Plants are alive and in flux. We put a new garden in, front and back, and I found a new gardener to tend it. She and her associate come once a month, and I’m learning a good deal from brief conversations and observations during their visits. It reminds me of working with copy editors—how I learned whatever I know about Chicago Manual of Style arcana. I can’t garden, but it’s helpful to have a sense of how they work and unfold. One school of garden design is to create “outdoor rooms.” In the back, a smaller and a larger terrace do this. The front garden is purely decorative, a gesture to the street and the walk up to the house. The back garden has a raised bed and others that define a small lawn and a walkway that goes back behind the barn. The barn has a small deck, shortened to make more room for a pear tree in front of it. There’s an apple tree that extends over its roof. A lemon tree, visible from the barn and recovered from the drought, is full of lemons. There’s a mix of function and ornament to the garden—fruit and vegetables along with roses and blossoming plants, some of which are herbs. The garden “wildlife” includes birds, squirrels, and cats. The deer are finally fenced out. Hummingbirds, small seed eaters, and jays elude the cats. The crows stick to the roofs of the houses. The jays land with a thump, surveying the scene as if they own it. The squirrels steal the apples and pears, eating bits of them only. The cats pass through, but occasionally find a place on the lower terrace to sun themselves. It’s too open for birding. A family of skunks once passed through, but they didn’t linger, thank goodness. In the house is an amaryllis that my father gave me. It recently revived and is now filled with shooting leaves. When dormant, it looks completely dead. It episodically flowers. I’ve managed to keep it alive, and think of it as a memorial of sorts, like tending the grave I never visit. Graves are also objects—more so than gardens. The only graves I’ve visited with any regularity are those of my cousins, members of a star-crossed branch of my family. The house in Inverness my son bought and is restoring has the makings of an extensive, terraced garden. Remnants of it are still there—plants, an irrigation system, wire netting to support vines, and so forth. I read that the climate is ideal for a vineyard. My daughter and I have discussed starting a tiny domain, a micro-appellation. It’s possible that the ashes of the architect, Daniel Liebermann, were buried or scattered somewhere on the site. Like the spirit of my house, but in my experience the dead are soon away unless held here by some attachment. My plan is to build a cottage, probably a prefabricated one, on a small site overlooking one end of this garden. The main house is interesting and even beautiful, with a sweeping view of the adjoining woods and a valley, but the garden view is more intimate. I’ve always favored places that suggest a world beyond themselves, yet are contained. When my father finished building his sailboat, he told me he felt his late father standing near him. That boat, made of plywood encased in resinous fiberglass, was an open class boat, a “baby Lightning,” he used to say, that he raced on the largest of our town’s seven lakes. He took navigation classes from the U.S. Power Squadron. Later, he chartered a sloop out of Falmouth and we sailed to Edgartown and, at my mother’s urging, to Nantucket. There were small craft warnings as we set out, but we sailed into a gale. We made it to Nantucket in five hours or so. The chart said there was a lightship where we were to turn, but it wasn’t there. “We’re turning,” my father said, and we came onto Nantucket’s narrow harbor entry dead on. I was always impressed by his abilities as a navigator. This was before GPS and the shipboard radar that’s now ubiquitous. He used the compass, the buoys, and a stopwatch. Later, my father bought a 30-foot Canadian sloop. It was a fast boat and I sailed with them on it to Edgartown from Galesville, near Annapolis, where they docked it. The boat had a crossbeam to hold the mast and I cracked my head on it numerous times, running forward to pass the sails up through the front hatch. I was good crew, but I never got the hang of sailing. You have to love it to master what it requires. I liked it, but not enough. The one boat I loved to sail was the Sunfish, a bone-simple thing with a dagger-board and one sail. We never owned one, but a friend had one and I used to sail it with him. Once it capsized and the sail fell on me, disorienting me. My friend pulled me out by the arm. Later, walking in London with him, he grabbed my arm again and kept me from being slammed into a cab I didn’t see, failing to look right. I’m still grateful to him for these interventions. When we sailed to Edgartown from Galesville, we went through the canal from Delaware Bay to Cape May, emerging on the open sea. I was putting up the jenny when half a dozen of what looked like sharks swam by. My father said they were porpoises, but I was terrified. In retrospect, I think he was right. Sharks don’t school.
I flew in a version of the Yankee Clipper when I was two. I remember that it had bunk beds. It was a converted bomber, my father told me later—a military plan redesigned for civil aviation. We flew from London to Shannon to Gander to New York. Although my family traveled mainly by ship or train, planes also figured. This was so long ago that they weren’t pressurized and had to fly through storms rather than above them, sometimes memorably. The Comet, a British jet aircraft, crashed too often. They found that its wings sheared off. This happened to the Electra, also. I flew one. To fly commercially was to participate in engineering gambles. Today, software is the issue, but back then, the problem was vibration. There were other problems. Engineers learn through failures. When I was 13, I flew to Traverse City to stay with my father’s sister and her family. On the Lake Central plane from Chicago, I was the only passenger and I had to beg the stewardess to stop plying me with lemonade. Naming the airline reminds me how many airlines there were. My first year at university, I flew Mohawk—two-engine Martins that made the “milk run” from New York City to Utica, Ithaca, and Rochester. Ithaca was hair-raising, the plane flying down the gorge to find the runway. Landing at the old Hong Kong airport in 1991, I looked out and saw people eating dinner in the apartment blocks. It was like landing in a train. The 707 gave long-haul a reliable plane. I flew it when I was 12 and when I was 18, returning from Europe. I once flew Air France with a throng of tourists from Baltimore and was struck by the dislike a stewardess clearly felt for them. At Charles de Gaulle after 9/11, I was harassed by French Customs officials in retaliation for some U.S. slight. That airport is as difficult as JFK or O’Hare to transfer, so I try to avoid it. Madrid and SFO are both convenient. Madrid is the only airport I’ve ever experienced with coherent signage. In November 2019, I satisfied my curiosity and flew the double-decker Airbus, above, from Melbourne to Singapore. It’s more impressive seen from the terminal than inside—the decks are big but not grand. The 787, a genuinely good plane, is more spatially pleasing—the only plane I’ve flown in with a modicum of grandeur. I never quite lost my anticipatory dread of flying. In my 30s, it caused me once to take the bus to Los Angeles, an experience that overcame my resistance. Once I’m under way, I continue without trepidation. This is how dread works. Of course, I’d feel differently if the plane crashed. The odds favor the passenger, but it’s a long way down. Clothes are odd things and our relationship to them is odder. Sometimes they’re like a sheaf of letters, the heat of which rises and falls over time. They permit display, but it’s not always clear when to look. They draw attention to body parts, often animated by the wearer’s movements. Caught looking is their hazard, but looking has a long history, starting in infancy. Life is initially experienced in parts, the whole sensed but elusive, a cloud of flesh and cloth that coos and warms. We never lose these attachments, and certain sights may bring them back. Clothes can be beautiful in themselves, but the wearer pays them off, especially when everything is as it should be, what my wife calls “well turned out.” There’s no formula for this, although it’s clear that the fashion brands do their best to package it for mass consumption. In reality, the genius is always personal. Men sometimes have it. The ones that impress me always have a nonchalance about it. They gave some thought to it, but not very much.
Mirrors present their subjects as objects, or is it the reverse? From very early on, we are captivated by our reflected image, this other self who is lives in an inverted, flattened universe, also subject to time’s effects. We become aware of mirrors that distort us—for fun and sometimes for enhancement, in our own view. On trips, it seems, we encounter our torsos in full reflection, sometimes a brutal reckoning. We resolve to pull ourselves together, but these resolutions are like those of New Year’s morning, often. Occasionally, we act on them and take pleasure in our progress: thinner, tauter faces and a narrower profile. Our clothes fit again, but the mirror tells all. Which is to say that we trust it more than our clothes alone. More than feeling the change, we want to see it. Our long relationship with our mirrored self has a kind of implicit trust, despite the subjectivity we bring to it. It’s here that we reconcile ourselves to who we are, to the limits of sprucing up, the realities of what nature gave us. A friend joked about her adolescent daughter’s fixation on her image, but it makes complete sense that her body’s transformation demands attention—more at that time than at others. The transition from boys to men is in contrast more gradual and less visually jarring, although on the hormonal front it’s of a piece with girls to women, I imagine. Whatever it is, self-love doesn’t cover it adequately. It’s more a continual adjustment that aging brings to the fore. A friend told me she knew a middle-aged colleague was having an affair because he “looked too good.” Absent the prod of desire’s consummation, the imperative to keep up appearances is less personally pressing. But it’s funny that men seem unaware how “looking too good” can strike others. With some, they may as well bay at the moon. That vampires are said to have no reflections has always interested me. Do they know this, going in? It’s hard to imagine living with such deprivation, even in exchange for immortality. Of course, blind mortals live this way, and some of them have tasted sight, known their reflection. It’s supposed to indicate the loss of their souls, but I would think this embrace of mere materiality would have other symptoms. That materialists are among us, selfdeclared and otherwise, suggests that materiality as such isn’t a bar to humanism. The Buddhist universe, too, is a vast ocean of transition, nothing to hold onto. Reincarnation, a Hindu remnant, is presented as a bad idea. The immortality of vampires requires their reinvention for successive cohorts, their need to fit in as contemporaries. It’s hard to picture the mental strain of doing this. I would think they would grow more alienated and eccentric. The Casanova-like need to seduce in order to feed also feels difficult to sustain. The turnover nature planned for us, our ticket of admission, is clearly better for us even on a personal level, despite our misgivings. (See “dread.”) Print is the term we use now for everything printed, to distinguish it from digital. Books, papers, and magazines fall in this category, and I still purchase or subscribe to them. The dwindling of newsstands—my local bookstore abandoned it for an expanded cookbook area—makes subscribing the main option. I read a fair amount online now. Small print is harder for me to read, so I think often of migrating to online exclusively for some things. But I like print, having lived with it for decades. Reading the newspapers is a longstanding habit. They’re more and more expensive to have delivered, but reading them online is less satisfactory—I miss too much, I find. Tracking an article down so I can share it is rarely easy if it’s the least bit specialized or obscure. Everything is tipped in certain directions known probably to the online editors. Their priorities aren’t mine. It’s okay for scanning the news on my phone—a circuit that’s also become habitual thanks to the apps. But reading an article in full is easier in print. Everything that once supported print has largely fallen away. At my old college, the library no longer has stacks filled with bound volumes of relevant journals. Becoming a visiting scholar, I found the current method of researching cumbersome and unsatisfactory. It would be one thing if it let you peruse what’s in storage, but little of it is scanned. I request an article and someone has to find and scan it. If collections are going to be stored remotely, then digitize them thoroughly—make the effort, however massive. There’s JSTOR, but it’s incomplete and off limits to independent scholars. This may be one case where knowledge should be free, but it will take public investment beyond any single university or institution to make it happen. The Seattle bookseller Peter Miller said in a talk I heard that he thought that books of quality would be printed and the rest would be digital. At another talk, a speaker took books as art to task, arguing for their functionality. I rose to defend such books as the collaborative work, often, of artists, poets or translators, designers, and printers. The point about print more generally is that it has a tradition of being done well, and successive generations still rise to it. It benefits editorially from this same tradition, spanning centuries. Digital will get there, I feel sure.
We err, I suppose, in thinking of cities as objects. Yet often they appear as such—skylines of towers or the walls of buildings that their gridded streets present us. Even as they step their scale down and we understand better their component parts, the effect is still one of objects on display, varied but uniform, united in the way they speak to us about access or separation. If the subject is a city, a district, a neighborhood, or a particular avenue or street, it has a character we associate with it, assigned popularly and confirmed or denied by personal experience. Character is generational, undone or made over across a lifetime like my own, even if parts remain untouched. The long novel The Man Without Qualities takes place in Vienna in 1913, but the city Robert Musil describes is largely interior, stage sets for what could readily be a made-for-streaming series. Slowly reading it, I see these spaces in my mind. Occasionally we’re on a road, moving from one space to another, but the city itself is absent. Or if it’s there, it’s there as polis, the body politic and its appendages—military, professional, and religious. Settings are what such a body needs, each a stage for one small part of an unfolding narrative without start or finish. I live in a city that resembles it, even if—looking out my window—I can describe a skyline within surrounding nature. Even if I can rattle off the difference between two places or the importance of three bridges, polis sums it up: unfolding unevenly, rich and poor alike, pursuing seven million or so strands of thinking that generate action and inaction. There is, in this construct, no such object as a city, only its subjects, dots on a moving, four-dimensional map. Several of my poems and many of my random thoughts deal with the motion and stasis that desire prompts. How is it that stopping off at a non-descript café several times and talking with the same Russian barista comes to mind so often? It’s the kind of detail Musil added, the backstory of small talk and pausing, a rehearsal, maybe. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 12. Before this, I held facsimiles in my mouth, imagining them. (These facsimiles were readily at hand—chocolate cigarettes, for instance.) My father smoked constantly when I was young, smoke rising from his cigarettes. Later, after turning almost yellow, he gave it up, a difficult process. But where I lived, we all smoked. Gradually I came to favor the strongest cigarettes I could find, ending up with the unfiltered French ones in their light-blue package. One summer, drinking Scotch and smoking more than usual, I dreamt I was made to eat crushed ice and ashes. I also got a bad sore throat, the first ever. I quit. Ironically, it was easy. The big temple in Asakusa sells talismans. The price varies. Is this a measure of efficacy or duration? A friend told me that the temple is associated with success in business and examinations. I went with her to another temple that had a device for accepting personal requests on rolled up pieces of paper. To illustrate such requests, she picked one at random and read it. I don’t remember what it said, but she made a face and commented that no religious person should make such a request. Buying a talisman has the advantage that you don’t really commit to anything specific. It’s open-ended, especially if you have no idea of its intended purpose. This is the luck of foreigners without the language, this blissful confidence. One small talisman I bought was so flamboyant that another friend suggested it was aphrodisiacal. After the fact, I think, which is likely how all of them work. Names are the handles we give our subjective world. We learn our own early on in the naming process, and others follow. Within families, names have a generational aspect, reappearing with and without suffixes. My son John may be the ninth generation in my father’s family to have it, while Elizabeth extends from my wife’s mother to our daughter and our son Ross’s daughter, although it moved sideways in my wife’s generation to her middle sister. At Thanksgiving, my cousin Anna came over and I thought how she shares one of my mother’s names. We learn to name subjects and objects in the same sweep of acquiring language. I wonder if this is a source our of childhood animism, naming the content of our experience, including our feelings. Language permits this, with its endless supply of nouns and modifiers, like Linnaeus setting out to classify nature or at least provide a framework. Family trees and the recording of events that officials think worth noting track names across time and space. That my father’s father came and went from New York City before settling there in 1904 is in the Ellis Island records. His name, passed from his father to his son, is one of Ross’s names, honoring them and my wife’s uncle (whose wife lobbied hard for the name when Ross was a baby and they were visiting here for her sisters’ weddings). One ritual of pairing up is to learn the full names of the beloved along with other attributes. I find they’re hard to forget.
A scaled-down world always appealed to me. A memorable scene in Bergman’s film Hour of the Wolf has the protagonist looking at a miniature performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Here, there are tiny actors. In childhood, puppet and marionette shows provided versions of this, but otherwise the imagination populated it. When I was six, I saw the Queen’s Dollhouse at Windsor Castle, a Georgian townhouse replete with tiny working replicas of motorcars and lawnmowers. The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago are comparable—settings that appear to open out onto a garden, a farm, a wilderness, or a city street. I had the catalogue from the Windsor dollhouse, although I no longer have it; those of the Thorne Rooms are on my shelves, and as a kid I had an issue of National Geographic that featured them. All of it was a prod to my imagination. At six, I visited a miniature town in England that had also featured in some magazine. I irritated my sister by taking up our adult host’s offer to see it again, walking back in the rain to absorb it in memory. This process of absorbing experience is me, how I work. It’s the same with art. I have a powerful memory for experiences of certain types. I once went to Paris specifically to see a Pierre Bonnard retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo. Only having two days and wanting also to visit the d’Orsay, I went to the exhibit after taking a shower but without resting. I was so jetlagged that had to sit down occasionally or lean against the wall, but I saw everything and was surprised afterward how much I absorbed, including the palais itself, built it the late 1930s with long, curving walls. It seems incongruous for an art gallery, but it works. Scale figures in how we relate to objects. Miniatures succeed when they enable us to grasp settings that we normally experience in parts. Of course, photographs do this, too, but miniatures have a reality we can control. A few years ago, I saw a retrospective of the paintings of Vanessa Bell at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. The work was displayed in the long set of connected galleries—rooms, you might say—in the original building designed by John Soane. The paintings were surprisingly small, painted with rooms like this in mind. Another time, I saw an exhibit of cubist art given to the Metropolitan Museum by Louis Lauder. The paintings were taken from his house, and there were photos showing how they’d been arranged. The galleries where they were displayed were small, an intimacy that worked well with paintings of their size. At MoMA I saw an exhibit of Cindy Sherman’s photos, some of which are gigantic. I hated much of it, feeling I was being made to look at billboards. Later, I saw it again at the Broad, mounted in that museum’s European-size galleries on its ground floor. Those “billboard” photos could now be seen like those heroic 19th-century paintings at the Louvre. They could be seen in their entirety, absorbed. What gives spirit to a place, genius loci, is the play of scale. The Broad impressed me, compared to the newly expanded SFMOMA, because it makes quite brilliant use of spatial variation and light—from above, from outside, and from in between as you descend. Light helps define space and bring out its character. Like human movement through a space, light is a dynamic element. In comparison, SFMOMA feels hemmed in. It’s also baffling to be in, whereas the Broad, almost classically simple, has a stately coherence. I like that in a museum. Spending time in Zurich in the second half of the 1990s, I noted a housing type that wraps a perimeter of dwelling around a rectangular and parklike courtyard. The result is a uniform street frontage with entries that look across these openings, sometimes permitting entry, sometimes not, but always with a bit of transparency. Friends here design housing with entry sequences and midblock walkthroughs that open larger buildings up to subdivide them. The larger masses are often quite simple, whereas the entries and walkthroughs occasion gestures to the eye on two scales—distinctively visible, to mark them for passersby, and more subtly variegated with plants and stoops to give a rhythm to movement through them and a sense, as one moves, that thought was given to the experience. In 1994, I spent two days in Venice, mostly walking around. Coming through what was clearly a back street, I was struck how it curved—not unlike the Palais de Tokyo—so that the quite ordinary, attached dwellings were set off. Our obsession with grids makes these curving streets and lanes exceptional, but they unfold as you walk. You see three or four dwellings, maybe, and new ones appear and the ones you saw recede from view. You’re no longer in a one-point perspective, a data point moving constantly toward and away; instead, the street is moving with you. In 1991, I visited Venice and met my friend Marta, whose family has lived in Venice and vicinity for centuries. We went for a walk from San Marco’s plaza to the Accademia Bridge. In the square with a 1960s addition to the Bauer is a Baroque church, San Moisè. “Too bad about the hotel,” I said. I remembered it from visiting the city when I was 12. “Yes,” Marta said, “And too bad about the church, also.” Expanded in the second half of the 17th century, its hogging of the limelight is still resented, more than five centuries later. For Venetians, scale matters.
James Lovelock described the earth as Gaia: not an object, but an organic whole. I thought of this, reading how the collapse of mass tourism and cruise ships has rapidly brought nature and cleaner water to Venice. The resource overlords who rule the planet’s would-be hegemons treat it like an object there for the taking. They treat it like other objects unlucky enough to fall in their grasp, to be used and disposed, ideally somewhere else. In his book, Why Only Art Can Save Us, Santiago Zabala argues that civilization has set things up so that culture puts the emergency we face out of sight or “hidden in plain sight,” as they say, with a scrim of genuinely fake news that denies there’s an emergency at all. The coronavirus pandemic is a vivid reminder that planetary emergencies exist and require concerted action across humanity to address. The witless strife among hegemons around the virus’s containment and the parallel difficulties managing its economic fallout show both how interlocked we all are in reality and how this basic fact of planetary life is unaccounted for in the calculations of our so-called leaders. As we face a vastly bigger emergency, we need to treat this smaller one as a wake-up call. What we awakened to do isn’t less than rethinking how we live in harmony with the Gaia, not as an object, but as our collective, subjective self. We have to see ourselves as planetary, with the responsibilities to our collective self that come along with it. We can no longer pretend to exempt ourselves from it, living as if the externalities are someone else’s problem. There is no exemption, no escape. We either act in concert or we will perish one by one and civilization will collapse. The choice is ours, here and now. The coronavirus parts the curtain; it outlines an emergency and how to respond to it. Spring isn’t an object but an objective—as soon as the winter solstice passes, I start looking for its signs. It was snowing in Tokyo in February 2005; I was told inexplicably that it was the first day of spring. Here, spring is tied to the vernal equinox, which (as I write this) is tomorrow. The wisteria has bloomed enough that I saw and heard a loudly buzzing bumblebee amid its blossoms earlier today, nominally the last day of winter. Some peg the equinox today, not tomorrow. I’m not sure. In Berkeley, these appear early. There’s a false spring of balmy weather; the plum trees blossom, and the bushes flower. I was in Tokyo for the opening of the Grand Hyatt. My writing partner and I were the third and fourth guests; the first and second were a young Japanese couple. At an opening event, I met a Sephardic resident of the city, who introduced me in turn to a young Parisian couple, architects, who were staying in a studio attached to his unheated house. It kept snowing, although it didn’t stick. The architects and I went to see Taniguchi’s jewel-box museum a Ueno Park, where I noted his interest in looking through spaces on several levels, the only aspect of his MoMA expansion that I admired—a view of the garden from an upper hallway. At Ueno Park, he achieved an elegant aesthetic appropriate the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures. MoMA turned it into a high-end office tower interior with art. The imagination it captured was that of its patrons. (See below.)
Taniguchi was a subject-as-object of that era—one of the personages traded among museums by the real estate moguls that made up their boards. The more successful of them received direct commissions—residential towers, for example. Some were luckier than him in their patrons. Herzog & de Meuron’s museum in San Francisco is an example, the best building of its era in the city thanks to Harry Parker, its director. Perhaps it was the setting that enabled him, them, and it to sidestep the city’s notoriously dead hand—conservatism vying with committees to kill off so much. There are exceptions among the region’s architects, who find patrons that work at the modest scale that is the region’s forte. I use this term in the sense of “architects practicing here,” since some of them resent the modifier “regional” as an East Coast putdown. I don’t see it that way, especially in a region like San Francisco Bay. I went out of my way to write a review of a book by two friends after it was slammed in a drive-by afterword by a New York City-based architect. I suspected professional jealousy, but the hit was also typical of the New Yorker map syndrome that makes New York City oddly provincial. (Ask the writer Alissa Walker about L.A.) It would be easier to make a case for the region if the work honored it consistently, but it ebbs and flows. There’s a good deal of derivation and a lot more crap. My neighbor Sally Woodbridge, who died in November 2019, did more than most to explain the region architecturally to itself. The guides she produced with her husband then ex-husband and others mixed a sense of history with a strong sense of taste. It’s like the restauranteur Alice Waters, defining a region’s cuisine with an innate modesty about cuisine in general. This region has a tradition and every generation has practitioners that both uphold it and make it contemporary, but on its own terms. Contemporary here may not be contemporary somewhere else. In the early 1980s, I wrote an article with Joseph Esherick for Space & Society. Esherick told me that he felt the ubiquity of media made regionalism impossible. That was 40 years ago. But then there’s David Harvey’s argument that ubiquity makes the particular more valued. Global and local need each other. It feels some light years from Taniguchi’s moment. These days, we’ve got BIG and its contemporaries, and we have varying shades of their elders, of those remaining. Names have morphed into firms, each trying to protect its niche. Like the universities, the coronavirus has driven them all online, not a natural space, although one they’re all occupying more and more in any case. I could see architecture shifting gears en masse, with offices shrinking and even seeking new kinds of venues or no venues at all. This has been in the cards for a generation, but it’s here. A license is another object to add to our small collection. Architects have them and interior designers don’t. Neither do graphic, industrial, product, UX, and web designers, although their work is specialized and, as we saw with the Boeing 737-Max, vital to human safety. Licensing, a state function, typically lags practice significantly. In tech, certification predominates. It probably makes sense for design, also—more sense than licensure. Or set it up like the separate licenses for driving a car, a motorcycle, or a truck. Consider basing it on certification, the way medical doctors separately certify as specialists or surgeons—a hybrid system. (I only have a driver’s license, btw.) No human is an object. Much else that is treated as mere objects is in fact a proper subject for thoughtfulness. A revived animistic spirit would treat Gaia, in whole and in parts, with appreciative reverence. Nothing taken without returning it in a benign and reusable form, nothing made that can’t be reused or repaired without massive and/or toxic waste, and nothing without staying power, however we define that: these are our three Ns. There’s a book on the Buddhist precepts that extends this list, getting closer to the bone. No human is an object. All are subjects for thoughtfulness, despite delusion, ego, and folly. All are a reason to find the ground again, recover ourselves, be. No human can be possessed except by momentary, mutual gift. There is no having, only unfolding with the rest. We are all subjects, collective and planetary—subject to the planet’s rules, its gravity, its points of stress. How we lost sight of this is a mystery. Hunters and gatherers surely knew their patch of earth like the back of their hand. The insight of the bourgeoisie was that the aristocracy had no clothes. That insight is broadly applicable. We are clothed owing to our efforts to be clothed. We are sheltered and fed owing to our efforts to be sheltered and fed. We take collective responsibility, not merely for ourselves, or we are again an aristocracy, nakedly parasitical. Something like the bodhisattva vow applies here: to save all sentient beings, including Gaia. Not to sacrifice ourselves, but to understand that saving all, we’re subject to the same salvation; saving none, destruction.
Common Place | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com