By MEL ARTHUR, SARAH WU, and GABBY AVENA
Mel Arthur:
Once the theme of Thing Theory was suggested, I could hear everyone’s (including myself) mind go blank. The collective question of what even is Thing Theory permeated almost every meeting. Sarah even asked me to do a mock Q&A where I attempted, using my muse, Toni Morrison, to explain how was thinking about Thing Theory more generally. Though difficult, I think this has been my favorite theme of the Indicator so far. I am not sure about others, but examining the way I interact with the world around me how I, as something, live with/about/around all the things that make up the world has allowed me to think about the beauty of these interactions. I think about my moon necklace, how its sharp corners still me every time I reach to touch it. I think about the sounds the trees make or how the sun filters through the tree gaps on a particularly nice day. I am thinking about the desk I sit at every day, cluttered with my things from end to end, how I and only I know my way around that mess. There is a beauty in that I truly cannot put into words. I have tried, and I keep trying with this theme to let the things I exist around invite me into their living and teach me what it means to cherish & I hope that you all can do the same. Let the things that surround you move you, hold you, and most importantly, let them allow you to remember the true richness of feeling.
Sarah Wu:
I once read a book about the design of everyday objects. Normal, functional things—like a doorknob. To be made into something functional is to be crafted in such a way that you are meant not to notice it at all. The object does what it is told; the doorknob opens the door. Hence, you can continue with your day-to-day life. The moment the doorknob leaves your hand, you are already swept away by the constant push and pull of life—what is for dinner? who is that cute girl? oh god, there’s an essay due in an hour.
Thing Theory is a process of breaking. “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us,” Bill Brown writes. To grab onto a doorknob and realize that you can’t open it—you jiggle the handle again, yet the lock holds firm. Suddenly, the unassuming doorknob is placed into clear focus. Your attention snaps to it; suddenly, you notice it. Was the doorknob always that shade of brown? The anger, too; the annoyance that creeps into your cheeks. You hit the door once, twice, and rattle the doorknob again. Still nothing. It makes you want to scream.
What does it mean when an object produces its own personhood and becomes an agent in your life? You cannot ignore the object. You are not anthropomorphizing the object—not making it like a person, but a thing with its own power, a production of affect that changes how you feel, how you react—it changes you.
Gabby Avena:
Hi there, reader. Right now you are taking the time to parse this text as words–a task I am grateful for–but in a moment I am going to ask you to stop. Unfocus your eyes and try looking at just this page as a singular object. How does your relationship with it change? Like clouds, can you see these texts as blobs and find something in their shape? Let your vision wander to the page next door. Try turning the book upside down. What else can you see? Maybe even go beyond the page-close your eyes and feel the book in your hands. What is its size, texture, and shape communicating to you? Play around for a minute–
–then come back to me. What did you find? For me, it was strangely dented human heads, candy bars with their ends chewed off, and a sleek finish that kept my fingers skittering across the page. How did it feel, to break the textual function of a book and listen for all the other ways it might put its voice in the air? I see this issue of The Indicator as a similar exercise.
Through these pages, our writers press their eyes and ears upon the many ordinary things that clutter their lives. They explore objects as actors in a reciprocal exchange–living ‘things’ gifting meaning to non-living ‘things’, which might give them nourishment, or luck, or memory–in return. More than that, they expand the frame of what the word ‘thing’ might contain, illuminating to the negative space of no-thing, or feeling how the absent object lingers. Like we did just now, I hope that as you take in each individual story, this thing of our thoughts might take its own shape, bound up together.