Allison Cobb
from Plastic: an autobiography 1
The following are sections are from an ongoing project called Plastic: an autobiography, which documents my unhealthy, obsessive relationship with a large plastic car part, and with the problematic philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Thing
The thing turned up in a corner of the yard, just outside the fence. I found it when I wentout in the afternoon to take Quincy for a walk. Curved and black, plastic. Four feet long, a foot at its widest. I thought at first it was a car bumper. I put it in the grass in front ofthe porch. The next morning it was still there. I sat next to it in the sun and looked close.
I was thinking of Heidegger, his essay called “The Thing.” He writes that distance disappears and all things come equally close because of technology. In 1949 he meant airplanes, the radio, TV. Things congeal around us in a uniform distanceless. But this does not make anything present. The only way to approach a thing, to bring it near, is by sidling up to it, by thinking around, or through, what appears obvious. He performs this kind of meditation on the “thingness” of a clay jug.
So I thought of meditating on this car part. Why did I put in the poem “Nothing” the image of the plastic inside the albatross: I am the no and the yes — a line I stole from Annah Sobelman’s first book. It has lived in my mind for years: an itch or splinter, contaminant. In the poem, Sobelman follows the line with a qualifying phrase. She narrows it, makes it domestic. I want the raw declaration, hanging there on the turn of itself:
I am the no
and the yes.
The albatross filled with plastic. Is it part nothing be cause it’s dead, the door not there. Maybe. More, it gives rise to a no. It is ugly, a painful image. I want it to go. But it persists. It pierces the uniform distanceless of my life, like the no and the yes.
.
The Mariner
Heidegger asks a strange question: “Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?
“Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened. Not to mention the single hydrogen bomb, whose triggering, thought through to its utmost potential, might be enough to snuff out all life on earth. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?
Coleridge never saw an albatross. Wordsworth said he gave his friend the idea for “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” when they were out walking around Somerset. He told Coleridge about an account he’d read of a British sailor in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica shooting a black albatross that for days had followed the ship.
When the sailor kills the bird in the poem, every vital force seems to fade. The winds stop, the ship stands still, the world falls silent. Only a bloody sun burns. The others hang the albatross around the sailor’s neck as a mark of his guilt, but the real curse is this: He is forced to live while everyone around him dies.
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye
It becomes a world of corpses. Even the sea rots. All that breathes is monstrous.
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Coleridge published his poem about a hundred years before Heidegger was born. When Heidegger looked around at the twentieth century, he described something like the mariner’s nightmare: corpses in a world of corpses. He had this idea that living under the sway of technology endangers people’s relationship to all that exists. It reduces everything — objects, animals, people, even oneself — to a stockpile of useful traits: labor power, money value, explosive force. As a result, everything dies. That is why Heidegger saw the hydrogen bomb as “mere,” only the logical extension of this state.
Once I heard my mother’s father thank my father, the only one to ever get a Ph.D., for going to work at Los Alamos. He said he was grateful for the atomic bomb because it meant he didn’t have to invade Japan. He stood in his sailor blues and watched from the deck of a ship in the Bay of Tokyo the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.
Heidegger spoke of the hydrogen bomb before it existed, before the people at LosAlamos succeeded in sparking a thermonuclear reaction — the kind that powers the sun — for the first time on earth. That happened about a year later, in May 1951, in a test at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific. In the car on the way home from my grandfather’s funeral, my aunt revealed the following: When she was a teenager, a man came to visit who had served in the Pacific with my grandfather. As soon as my grandfather was out of earshot, this man reported that my grandfather had saved his life. They somehow got separated from their ship and marooned on an island. Two Japanese soldiers attacked. Armed with nothing but a knife, my grandfather killed them both.
Norm. Norman Isidore Olson. Son of Swedish immigrants. He worked his entire life after the war at Woodward Governor, a factory that made air plane parts. The governor regulates the speed and power of a motor. My grandmother said that when he got back from the war he had nightmares, screams yanking them both from sleep. She said this as if it were something dark, a secret. He told her it was hard to go back inside the factory after so long on the open water.
I asked him once to tell me about the war. He told me this: His bunkmate on the ship always ate his ice cream first because, as he would say, life is short.
The Betrothed
Mortal: what hangs in the halo of its own blank, of course. Birth and death. In between — world. What exists. Stuff. Matter and form. Here it is.Kick it.
Heidegger, though, goes further. He says it is things that bring the world into presence. By thing he means all, even animals. He makes a list: jug and bench, footbridge and plow. Tree and pond, brook and hill. Heron and deer, horse and bull. Mirror, clasp, picture, book.
No thing just sits there, inert. The thing things, says Heidegger. It gathers, enfolding earth and sky, divinities and mortals.
This rang in me with a lovely clarity. Yes I thought.
Then I read that scholars find the claim obscure, or they dismiss it as a poetic indulgence, as “gibberish.”
Gibberish implies sound with no meaning, nonsense. Nonsense suggests being lost, from “to find one’s way.” I wandered for months, through the turn of a year in fact, winding inside the nested potentials of Heidegger’s strange language, the painstaking labor to shape into English forms his transmuted nouns and verbs, the odd creations that result, intricate thought structures crowding up.
But listen,
the thing things.
It calls out, the car part — curled now for months on the floor of my bedroom, the flat clap when I trip over it in the dark as I do almost every night. The thing become joke, a thought, root, a prop.
No, that’s not right.
Be-thinged.
We are the be-thinged, says Heidegger. I think “bejeweled,” which means covered in rhinestones applied with a hot gun, and also a videogame that requires lining up rows of matching gems, which people have downloaded more than 150 million times.
Then I think betrothed.
In “A Year in Music,” Dana Ward writes “Voldemort deposited the pieces of his soul in several objects to resurrect his wretched body later. I’m typing this up on a Horcrux now ... Unlike the Dark Lord, the people lost inside each thing & thought this room contains will not get back the bodies or the time they have lost. Nor will you.”
Nor will I. Thus loss
this world
brings forth
out of stuff. Loss,
loss claims every relation
to matter since Plato
says Heidegger.
All images are after.
That’s Joan Retallack. The instant of encounter involves a swerve, something changes, has changed. Is already lost, which means “cut off.” But still this desire lingers to stop, to know a thing to its depths, to fix it in understanding. And isn’t that the whole impetus for this? For spending like this these hours of a life that will not be got back?
Be-thinged. Betrothed. Bedingt. The common meaning of the German word is limited, qualified, conditional.
Heidegger: “In the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the be-thinged, the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness.”
The English word condition comes from Latin com, together, plus dicere, to speak. As in to negotiate, make a pact, set terms, dwindled over time to mean the terms themselves. The conditions to which one agrees. One is limited, partial, so one must address the others, one must pledge oneself to each other as essential. As also a part. Not only people but all things, made and unmade, that create the world. One is thoroughly pledged, that is, betrothed.
Betrothed leads to love? The word appears once in Heidegger’s lecture, and it is not his. He is talking about the tendency in Western metaphysics to use the word “thing” to refer to anything at all that is. He quotes Meister Eckhart quoting Dionysius the Areopagite: love is of such a nature that it changes man into the thing he loves.
What if we shed all this and turned to things as ourselves, with love. Not as ourselves, but as they, the things, as us. What if we loved the thing as life itself, lives lost, bodies and time. We could not get back what’s lost, but maybe, betrothing ourselves, we could stop the loss to come. If we loved enough.
Not we. Me. Let’s say me. Let’s say I did this. I turned toward this piece of plastic. And thought to betroth myself to it, to the lives in it, against future loss. As a stop to the loss to come.
I wait.
For what --
a sign. For an albatross to wake from my chest and take flight.
But it remains just me. Me alone in a room with a car part, its dirty carapace curled around me. Me and my desire, which is boundless, sidereal.
It glues its glittering look onto every surface.
References
Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2002)
Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Peru, IL: arus Publishing Company, 2007)
Graham Harman, “Dwelling with the Fourfold,” Space and Culture 2009 12: 292 originally published online 8 July 2009, 297.
Graham Harman, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A New Theory of Causation,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1, 2010.
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 163-186
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Bremen and Freiberg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 20
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: arper Perennial, 1977) 3-35
Joan Retallack, “Introduction: Essay as Wager,” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 1-19
‘annah Sobelman, The Tulip Sacrament (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 8
Dana Ward, “A Year in Music,” in Poets off Poetry, coldfront magazine, http://coldfrontmag.com/poets-off-poetry/a-year-in-music-by-dana-ward
Mark Ward, “Casual Games Make a Serious Impact,” BBC News website, March 18, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7301374.stm5\
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon.
from Plastic: an autobiography 1
The following are sections are from an ongoing project called Plastic: an autobiography, which documents my unhealthy, obsessive relationship with a large plastic car part, and with the problematic philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Thing
The thing turned up in a corner of the yard, just outside the fence. I found it when I wentout in the afternoon to take Quincy for a walk. Curved and black, plastic. Four feet long, a foot at its widest. I thought at first it was a car bumper. I put it in the grass in front ofthe porch. The next morning it was still there. I sat next to it in the sun and looked close.
I was thinking of Heidegger, his essay called “The Thing.” He writes that distance disappears and all things come equally close because of technology. In 1949 he meant airplanes, the radio, TV. Things congeal around us in a uniform distanceless. But this does not make anything present. The only way to approach a thing, to bring it near, is by sidling up to it, by thinking around, or through, what appears obvious. He performs this kind of meditation on the “thingness” of a clay jug.
So I thought of meditating on this car part. Why did I put in the poem “Nothing” the image of the plastic inside the albatross: I am the no and the yes — a line I stole from Annah Sobelman’s first book. It has lived in my mind for years: an itch or splinter, contaminant. In the poem, Sobelman follows the line with a qualifying phrase. She narrows it, makes it domestic. I want the raw declaration, hanging there on the turn of itself:
I am the no
and the yes.
The albatross filled with plastic. Is it part nothing be cause it’s dead, the door not there. Maybe. More, it gives rise to a no. It is ugly, a painful image. I want it to go. But it persists. It pierces the uniform distanceless of my life, like the no and the yes.
.
The Mariner
Heidegger asks a strange question: “Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?
“Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened. Not to mention the single hydrogen bomb, whose triggering, thought through to its utmost potential, might be enough to snuff out all life on earth. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?
Coleridge never saw an albatross. Wordsworth said he gave his friend the idea for “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” when they were out walking around Somerset. He told Coleridge about an account he’d read of a British sailor in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica shooting a black albatross that for days had followed the ship.
When the sailor kills the bird in the poem, every vital force seems to fade. The winds stop, the ship stands still, the world falls silent. Only a bloody sun burns. The others hang the albatross around the sailor’s neck as a mark of his guilt, but the real curse is this: He is forced to live while everyone around him dies.
Each turned his face with a ghastly pang,
And cursed me with his eye
It becomes a world of corpses. Even the sea rots. All that breathes is monstrous.
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Coleridge published his poem about a hundred years before Heidegger was born. When Heidegger looked around at the twentieth century, he described something like the mariner’s nightmare: corpses in a world of corpses. He had this idea that living under the sway of technology endangers people’s relationship to all that exists. It reduces everything — objects, animals, people, even oneself — to a stockpile of useful traits: labor power, money value, explosive force. As a result, everything dies. That is why Heidegger saw the hydrogen bomb as “mere,” only the logical extension of this state.
Once I heard my mother’s father thank my father, the only one to ever get a Ph.D., for going to work at Los Alamos. He said he was grateful for the atomic bomb because it meant he didn’t have to invade Japan. He stood in his sailor blues and watched from the deck of a ship in the Bay of Tokyo the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.
Heidegger spoke of the hydrogen bomb before it existed, before the people at LosAlamos succeeded in sparking a thermonuclear reaction — the kind that powers the sun — for the first time on earth. That happened about a year later, in May 1951, in a test at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific. In the car on the way home from my grandfather’s funeral, my aunt revealed the following: When she was a teenager, a man came to visit who had served in the Pacific with my grandfather. As soon as my grandfather was out of earshot, this man reported that my grandfather had saved his life. They somehow got separated from their ship and marooned on an island. Two Japanese soldiers attacked. Armed with nothing but a knife, my grandfather killed them both.
Norm. Norman Isidore Olson. Son of Swedish immigrants. He worked his entire life after the war at Woodward Governor, a factory that made air plane parts. The governor regulates the speed and power of a motor. My grandmother said that when he got back from the war he had nightmares, screams yanking them both from sleep. She said this as if it were something dark, a secret. He told her it was hard to go back inside the factory after so long on the open water.
I asked him once to tell me about the war. He told me this: His bunkmate on the ship always ate his ice cream first because, as he would say, life is short.
The Betrothed
Mortal: what hangs in the halo of its own blank, of course. Birth and death. In between — world. What exists. Stuff. Matter and form. Here it is.Kick it.
Heidegger, though, goes further. He says it is things that bring the world into presence. By thing he means all, even animals. He makes a list: jug and bench, footbridge and plow. Tree and pond, brook and hill. Heron and deer, horse and bull. Mirror, clasp, picture, book.
No thing just sits there, inert. The thing things, says Heidegger. It gathers, enfolding earth and sky, divinities and mortals.
This rang in me with a lovely clarity. Yes I thought.
Then I read that scholars find the claim obscure, or they dismiss it as a poetic indulgence, as “gibberish.”
Gibberish implies sound with no meaning, nonsense. Nonsense suggests being lost, from “to find one’s way.” I wandered for months, through the turn of a year in fact, winding inside the nested potentials of Heidegger’s strange language, the painstaking labor to shape into English forms his transmuted nouns and verbs, the odd creations that result, intricate thought structures crowding up.
But listen,
the thing things.
It calls out, the car part — curled now for months on the floor of my bedroom, the flat clap when I trip over it in the dark as I do almost every night. The thing become joke, a thought, root, a prop.
No, that’s not right.
Be-thinged.
We are the be-thinged, says Heidegger. I think “bejeweled,” which means covered in rhinestones applied with a hot gun, and also a videogame that requires lining up rows of matching gems, which people have downloaded more than 150 million times.
Then I think betrothed.
In “A Year in Music,” Dana Ward writes “Voldemort deposited the pieces of his soul in several objects to resurrect his wretched body later. I’m typing this up on a Horcrux now ... Unlike the Dark Lord, the people lost inside each thing & thought this room contains will not get back the bodies or the time they have lost. Nor will you.”
Nor will I. Thus loss
this world
brings forth
out of stuff. Loss,
loss claims every relation
to matter since Plato
says Heidegger.
All images are after.
That’s Joan Retallack. The instant of encounter involves a swerve, something changes, has changed. Is already lost, which means “cut off.” But still this desire lingers to stop, to know a thing to its depths, to fix it in understanding. And isn’t that the whole impetus for this? For spending like this these hours of a life that will not be got back?
Be-thinged. Betrothed. Bedingt. The common meaning of the German word is limited, qualified, conditional.
Heidegger: “In the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the be-thinged, the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness.”
The English word condition comes from Latin com, together, plus dicere, to speak. As in to negotiate, make a pact, set terms, dwindled over time to mean the terms themselves. The conditions to which one agrees. One is limited, partial, so one must address the others, one must pledge oneself to each other as essential. As also a part. Not only people but all things, made and unmade, that create the world. One is thoroughly pledged, that is, betrothed.
Betrothed leads to love? The word appears once in Heidegger’s lecture, and it is not his. He is talking about the tendency in Western metaphysics to use the word “thing” to refer to anything at all that is. He quotes Meister Eckhart quoting Dionysius the Areopagite: love is of such a nature that it changes man into the thing he loves.
What if we shed all this and turned to things as ourselves, with love. Not as ourselves, but as they, the things, as us. What if we loved the thing as life itself, lives lost, bodies and time. We could not get back what’s lost, but maybe, betrothing ourselves, we could stop the loss to come. If we loved enough.
Not we. Me. Let’s say me. Let’s say I did this. I turned toward this piece of plastic. And thought to betroth myself to it, to the lives in it, against future loss. As a stop to the loss to come.
I wait.
For what --
a sign. For an albatross to wake from my chest and take flight.
But it remains just me. Me alone in a room with a car part, its dirty carapace curled around me. Me and my desire, which is boundless, sidereal.
It glues its glittering look onto every surface.
References
Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2002)
Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Peru, IL: arus Publishing Company, 2007)
Graham Harman, “Dwelling with the Fourfold,” Space and Culture 2009 12: 292 originally published online 8 July 2009, 297.
Graham Harman, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A New Theory of Causation,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1, 2010.
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 163-186
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Bremen and Freiberg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 20
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: arper Perennial, 1977) 3-35
Joan Retallack, “Introduction: Essay as Wager,” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 1-19
‘annah Sobelman, The Tulip Sacrament (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 8
Dana Ward, “A Year in Music,” in Poets off Poetry, coldfront magazine, http://coldfrontmag.com/poets-off-poetry/a-year-in-music-by-dana-ward
Mark Ward, “Casual Games Make a Serious Impact,” BBC News website, March 18, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7301374.stm5\
Allison Cobb is the author of Born2 (Chax Press) about her hometown of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Green-Wood (Factory School) about a nineteenth-century cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times called Green-Wood “a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem.” She is a 2015 Djerassi Resident Artist; a 2014 Playa Resident Artist; received a 2011 Individual Artist Fellowship award from the Oregon Arts Commission; and was a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon.